Castle to Castle

Happiness

2011-12-29T14:41:00.000-05:00

In our current world of cynicism and cultural/spiritual dissolution, there is much confusion as to what constitutes happiness. In our time, happiness is conceived as a commodity, even though to be fair, this aspect of man has always been with us since time immemorial. Today, many people have come to regard happiness as a right that is conferred on us as an entitlement by the state and other welfare institutions.

However, keeping with the nature of commodities, happiness thus, is something that merely fulfills a function of our day-to-day activities. Because happiness is viewed as a commodity - a cheap one that can easily be prostituted according to timely demands - it is then not difficult to realize why so many vacuous souls today view happiness as something that must always be attained from the outside, something one picks up off a candy store shelf, as it were.

The plastic surgery industry is a vivid but lamentable example of what happens to people when they opt for a life that is lived merely for the moment. So, too, is our home foreclosure disaster. I suppose that pity is the worst emotion that one can reserve for some people. Such vanity speaks for itself: Vanitas, in Latin means emptiness.

Horace is right in asserting that it is reason and sense that remove anxiety, not houses that overlook the sea. Needless to say, ours is not a time that has any use for wisdom. This, of course, is one of the central contradictions and potent ironies that inform our time, because judging by all practical accounts, people in our day and age can make tremendous gains by incorporating wisdom in their lives.

Happiness is truly a condition of human beings that should concern us as whole persons. Realistically, when we talk about happiness and contentment, we are talking about the state of our being during any given stage of our lives. This may ebb and flow throughout our lives, of course, the key, however, is to remain reasonable in the demands that we make of objective reality.

This mature sense and sensibility for happiness is one that is pre-reflective in nature. In other words, if one has to ask what happiness is, then clearly that person, like characters in Woody Allen films, is definitely not happy. This, then, is contentment. This may seem like a strange notion to vain people. In our time, rarely do we ever concern ourselves with the totality of Being, "the glow of being," Sinatra refers to this in one of his marvelous songs.

People in our age have gotten so insipid that we constantly hear cries of “What good is wisdom for?” This is readily followed by the question, “What do you mean by wisdom?”

Unfortunately, the insolvent degree of our characterless age is also well represented by the professional class. This is one reason why I have no desire to dwell in textbook accounts of happiness. This would only amount to an exercise in fruition. What the philosophy and ethics professors have to say about happiness today does not concern me the slightest. One cannot live vitally and authentically by embracing sophomoric notions that originate in graduate seminars that have little or no bearing on the real world of people of flesh and bones.

"Rain"

2011-10-31T15:41:00.000-04:00

Francisco Mittag stood on the steps of the small church, where he had just attended the noon Mass. He watched the rain for several minutes. It had rained for three days.

The town square was empty. The uneven cobblestones of the small plaza were slippery. The rain continued falling, even though this was a gentler rain than when he entered the church, about an hour earlier. Francisco opened his umbrella and smiled.

Holding his black umbrella high above his head momentarily, Francisco looked out into the distance, where the narrow street ended. The steady rain created a bluish-white film that occluded his vision. He could not see the nearby hills.

Walking in the rain, Francisco got the impression that the world had gotten smaller. He noticed that all the storefronts were closed. He stopped and listened to the sound of the August rain hitting his tout umbrella. He watched the water trickling down all around him creating an enveloping and cascading circle of cool water.

Francisco Mittag looked in the direction of his home, about seven city blocks due east. He stood and thought. Then he turned his sight to the hills that began at the edge of town. He began walking westward.

Sloshing through water that in some places was about two inches deep, he smiled again. Now fifty-six years old, Francisco had not taken an idle walk in the rain since the time he was a young boy.

Looking around, he became perplexed in not encountering a single person in the small shops or in the street.

Francisco’s legs were soaked up to just right below the knee. He walked for a while. Several minutes later, he stopped walking and turned around to glance at the town behind him. The steady rain created an opaque film that erased the bright contours of the town, much like the pencil drawings of many a bored child at school.

The rain did not let up.

Francisco continued walking. When he reached the beginning of the tree line that signaled the upward slope of the hills, he paused. The town had virtually disappeared. Only the church steeple was barely visible.

He walked into the woods. The tall canopy provided by the trees afforded him a respite from the rain. He sat on some rocks that he and his friends used to climb as young boys.

Closing his eyes, Francisco began humming Debussy’s “Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun.” He was immediately transported back to the small living room of his childhood house, where his mother sewed while listening to soft, impressionistic music. Francisco imagined his two sisters sitting nearby on the dining room table playing with dolls. He remembered how the three of them laughed when their father dozed off on his wingback chair and dropped the book he was reading. This was a nightly occurrence. Francisco smiled.

The rain continued. He placed the umbrella in the space where his left elbow met his bicep. He locked it in place, like a toddler holding a toy. He could not see the town. “How small the world seems,” he thought.

He then leaned back, his head now resting in the gap between two young trees. He kicked some standing water and smiled. Francisco then closed his eyes and slept.

The Embrace of Scientism Does not Amount to Self-Knowledge

2011-09-30T15:55:00.000-04:00

What would constitute total, engulfing knowledge? If the knowledge that we reap from science or philosophy is considered in terms of monetary value, then clearly our age can be said to be richer than any previous.

The average person today has come into contact with the inner principles of such a complex miasma of human endeavors that one cannot help but marvel at how easy it all now seems. Science has given us seemingly untold control over our sense of utility.

Realistically, we can say that we have come to know in the first decade of the twenty first century whatever it is that we are capable of knowing. What else is there to knowing, for the moment?

Of course, this is paradoxical. Parmenides said it best when he asserted that all we know is being, and not non-being. How else are we to point out the obvious?

For a time, perhaps even dating back to the ancient Greeks, it seemed that man would come to possess himself in the glare and fullness of self-understanding. No different than a newborn babe looking around its newly found environment and finding itself awed by the sight of its own little hands, man, too, danced around his own existence in the anticipation of closing the field of self-knowledge. The hope was that this would come after the initial discovery of some of the principles that govern physical existence.

However, the physical conditions that govern human beings, we now realize, are only one aspect of the human condition, no matter how hard some radical skeptics try to debunk this common sense understanding. The embrace of scientism does not amount to self-knowledge.

Excerpt from my book Philosophical Perspectives on Cinema

2011-08-30T09:15:00.002-04:00

At one end of the scale the world – persons, things, situations – is given to us in the aspect of “lived” reality; at the other end we see everything in the aspect of “observed” reality.

- José Ortega y Gasset

Somerset Maugham is correct in his assessment in The Summing Up that philosophers are responsible for offering the “plain man a vision and suitable, even if tentative, answer to human concerns.”

      He argues that to evade this aspect of the discipline is to neglect a central aspect of the philosophical vocation. Maugham writes: “But the plain man’s interest in philosophy is practical. He wants to know what the value of life is, how he should live and what sense he can ascribe to the universe. When philosophers stand back and refuse to give even tentative answers to these questions they shirk responsibilities.”

      Some critics argue that cinema is an escapist medium. To some degree this is not only true, but also at times, it even serves a therapeutic purpose. Perhaps we should be sincere and remind ourselves that in a truer sense, all entertainment is escapist. However, human forms of entertainment can be rather imaginative, instructive, innovative and varied, from: the subtle relaxation of fishing, to the mental prowess of a chess match, to a baseball game or gardening.

      Yet to this we must add the relevant qualification that all forms of entertainment are ecstatic — to use the ancient notion of being outside ourselves — that is, they help to situate our existence in the world-at-large, as it were.

      Hence, cinema is valuable as an artistic form on its own merits because it acts as a kind of representation of human life. Part of the reason for this — as is also the case in personal life — is that the greatest lessons taught by reality proper usually go unnoticed by the average person in their immediacy. Let us not forget that experience alone teaches us nothing. We must reflect on the meaning of our experiences in order to understand them.

      If we do not reflect on the meaning and value of our experiences, then we just merely pass through the world without ever taking inventory of the purpose and meaning of our lives. This is perhaps where the work of the well-meaning commentator can find its strongest justification.

From a strictly philosophical perspective - realism - or the attempt to see things as they really are without idealization, over-intellectualization, or ideological blinders should in principle serve as the fulcrum from which the thoughtful person can access the meaning of a film.

      However, raw reality - what can be referred to as the immediacy of experience - can never be truly surpassed. Ironically, it is precisely because of reality’s translucent quality that we often take life for granted. In other words, commentators, as well as the reflective viewer, serve as students of reality who try to reconstruct vital reality by reflecting on what any given film is attempting to accomplish. We are responsible players in this dramatic marriage, just as much as we are in our ability to decipher objective reality.

      Hence, the appeal of cinema for most people resides in its apparent portrayal of reality and its power to transform aspects of human existence into entertainment value. To the philosophical commentator, this quality can be brought to life through a film’s structural narrative, and the lingering impressions, emotions and thoughts that it can give rise to.

      The most interesting dilemma for the student of human life is that the objects of knowledge - as these exist in their immediacy - often absorb us in such a manner that we tend to forget ourselves. This is hardly a bad thing, however. Isn’t this perhaps also a good description of human life itself?

      This process necessitates a lapse in time that is necessary in order for reflection to occur, much like the light of a dead star that will continue to be seen for the duration of the time that it takes light to travel the distance between the star and Earth.

      However, cinema finds itself in a historically precarious situation today. Much like many aspects of human life, it has been cheapened, robbed of any inherent redemptive value. The problem is that in many cases cinema has become entertainment for the sake of entertainment, or what is essentially a dispensable, hollow, and disposable medium…just like human life, today.

      The denizens of aesthetic relativism and those who have radically politicized western culture have succeeded in blurring the line between high and low cultural expectations to such an extent that this medium now seems destined for certain aesthetic bankruptcy. The myopia for pretentious and coerced “theory” and radical ideological consumption, have had far-reaching and utterly destructive consequences that dictate how we think of cinema as well as leisure, in our time.

Cinema has traditionally showcased its unique and privileged capability in its regard for secular and religious humanism. For instance, this understated humanism is evidenced in the camaraderie that is so effectively placed on display in William Wellman’s film Battleground, as well as in the surreal inner vitality felt by Bertrand in François Truffaut’s The Man Who Loved Women.

Equally ennobling is Nick Charles’ sophisticated and urbane wit in The Thin Man series, and the ethereal weightlessness and fanciful mayhem of Frank Capra’s You Can’t Take It With You. These films embrace profound depictions of fundamental aspects of human existence.

For instance, few other aspects of human existence are as exalting as laughter - the act of celebrating life by keeping proper perspective - a form of checks-and-balances over the trivial and mundane.

And yet, also corresponding to the human condition is the stark, existential horror of living under communist dictatorship that Alec Leamas encounters in The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, the cathartic and joyful innocence of children in Albert Lamorisse’s Red Balloon, and the out of this world mayhem of Eliseo Subiela’s Hombre mirando al sudeste. Cinema can help us understand ourselves, as a culture, but most importantly, as autonomous individuals, and the purpose and meaning of our lives.

Camus

2011-07-24T09:46:00.001-04:00

There are very striking philosophical similarities between Camus' The First Man and his first book, A Happy Death. In A happy Death, which he completed in 1938 at the age of twenty-five, the author develops a very interesting, if not altogether original idea that has the thinker attempting to capture the essence and immediacy of death. In this work the young Camus is concerned with living a good life in order to have a “happy” death.

In other words, Camus’ main contention has everything to do with the Socratic notion that philosophy is a preparation for death through a conscious readiness to die. A Happy Death is essentially a meditation on the values of a future oriented existence that is aware that the future is already imbedded in a vitally lived immediacy.

The theme of the passage of time is a central and unifying theme in these two works. In A Happy Death, Patrice Mersault, the autobiographical main character comes to the realization that to possess time can be both, magnificent as well as a very dangerous thing. The rallying point of this contention is that idleness is a fatal condition that can foster existential stagnation and mediocrity. However, this cannot be said of the creative life. Instead, Camus argues that true reflection can only take place when framed by the presence of idle time.

In The First Man Camus equally follows through with this same concern that he had as a younger man. The death of his father in the latter work signifies the horror that the passage of time can mean to a reflective soul. Mersault and Jacques desire transcendence. In both cases, the consensus is that happiness originates from having a pure heart and the necessary will to implement the virtues thereof.

Camus’ situation as a philosopher and writer was rather precarious. There is a sense in which he can easily be regarded as a stoic. His notion of metaphysical rebellion showcases a courageous engagement with reality that leaves no room for external blame or sentimental rationalization.

In addition, he also does not allow metaphysical rebellion the indiscretion of becoming the basis and escape valve of ideology. This perspective on human reality alone makes Camus' very original, especially for a Twentieth-Century thinker, a time when many intellectuals were mere mouthpieces of Marxism. As a stoic, Camus did not shun the world of men and retire to a private existence. This is evident from his engagement in the French resistance and his voicing concern for those people who suffered Soviet-bloc, communist atrocities.

However, there is a also a very reserved and dignified side to Camus the man, which he found to be at odds with Camus the public entity. Yet he seems to have found a resolute answer to this dilemma by demanding that the autonomy of the thinker, as one who attempts to bring coherence to what Kant has called the “chaos of sensations,” is respected.

The thinker for Camus is always a creator of worlds. A very strong indication of the respect that he felt for other thinkers and the creative process itself is seen in the scant number of negative references that he makes to the work of others.

In The Myth of Sisyphus Camus does make mention of Dostoyevsky when he writes of The Brothers Karamazov and Kafka’s The Trial and The Castle, but he always does so in a positive light. His references to Nietzsche, Kierkegaard and Chestov are merely instances of praise that allow Camus to argue a particular point. The rest of The Myth of Sisyphus is an exploration of the nature of life and death and the Socratic question of what constitutes a worthwhile life.

Equally true, in the The Rebel Camus stirs clear of offhanded criticism of the thought of others. In the first part of that work the focus is on man’s place in what he considers an absurd universe. The first part of the The Rebel is reminiscent of the vital and intellectual honesty of the thought of such thinkers as Marcus Aurelius, Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, to mention just a few.

Auto-gnosis, Subjectivity, and the Role of Maxims in Philosophical Reflection

2011-06-23T10:56:00.001-04:00

Philosophy triumphs over past ills and ills to come,

but present ills triumph over philosophy.

— Francois Duc De La Rochefoucauld

Sitting outside late into the night and starring into the infinitely vast array of star clusters, nebulas, and galaxies the amateur astronomer becomes privy to the sublimity of space and time. However, the real joy and beauty of the aforementioned transcends mere scientific respect for the laws of astro-physics. Scientists explain questions of space and time through quantification of one form or other. Yet the fundamentally vital concern in all of this is the realization that the awe and wonder of space and time does not pertain so much to that reality itself, but to the fact that there should be a subject that can fathom such things. To scrutinize this reality in mere scientific terms amounts to a detriment to this particular human experience — making it an incomplete experience, at best. What is the role of the subject in this respect? Instead a broader concern has to do with the vital nature of subjectivity and its relationship to the metaphysics of existential autonomy.

The introspective qualities of this question subsequently lead me to ask: How come that most works of philosophy, with a few marked exceptions outside the thought of the ancient stoics, and modern thinkers such as Wilhelm Dilthey, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, and movements like philosophy of life, phenomenology and existentialism have not allotted the question of subjectivity – a more prominent role as the seat of differentiated human existence?

Historical examples abound where what is truly addressed is not man as a differentiated cosmic and reflective subject, but rather as a theoretical and elusive collective mankind that, quite frankly, cannot help but to remain faceless. My pre-occupation with this subject matter — that is, my immediate and vital interest here is not necessarily in understanding the historical whereabouts of mankind — our origins in space and time, our collective sub-conscious or other such commonly held anthropological conceptions of man.

I suppose there is a place — even a special place in the history of ideas for a detailed and scientific consideration and treatment of this subject. However, the pressing necessity for today is to recognize that the overwhelming treatment of this question has taken place in an inane positivistic manner. The inability of positivistic theories to recognize man as a transcendent being has played itself out to such a degree that it can longer make sense of individual, differentiated man in a technological age. Today we have the vitally pressing need for an understanding of man that allows for the recognition and further development of man as an autonomous being. Perhaps the great irony of our time is that man has never been in greater need of embracing a genuinely felt and sincere autonomous personality and form self-expression.

I must confess that I have never encountered “man” — at least not in the impersonal, abstracted form which science, and lately, the social sciences have constructed. Scientific renditions of man have fashioned man into a phantasmagoric specter that no longer recognizes itself. This clay caricature has invaded the sublime places were man once dwelled and in so doing has depleted man’s reservoir of meaning in all of its configurations.

My concern, then, has to do with subjectivity and how this is embedded in the structure of autonomous persons. The question of subjectivity and individual autonomy can only retain a genuine connection to reality when it is proposed by the subject itself. This activity is no other than the genuine calling forth of personal vocation. Leszek Kolakowski pinpoints the scope of this problem best when he writes in Modernity on Endless Trial:

Those who hate gardening need a theory. Not to garden without a theory is a shallow, unworthy way of life. A theory must be convincing and scientific. Yet to various people various theories are convincing and scientific. Therefore we need a number of theories. The alternative to not-gardening without a theory is to garden. However, it is much easier to have a theory than actually to garden.

The 2011 Indianapolis 500

2011-05-31T14:53:00.000-04:00

The Indianapolis 500 is the premier automobile race in the world. It is also a grand event that celebrates America, its people and hope. The Indy 500 celebrated its 100^th anniversary this year.

Those who follow automobile racing realize that the Indy 500 is a long race that has many ups and downs, and above all, many surprises. This year’s race was no different than in past years. In other words, the 2011 edition of the race had many surprises.

The end of this year’s race seemed like a Greek tragic-comedy. Thankfully, no drivers were seriously hurt in any of the crashes.

For rookie, J.R. Hildebrand, this race will remain the great catch that got away. When it seemed that he was about to win the race on the last lap, the twenty-three year old driver gassed his car right into the wall. This accident was by all accounts unthinkable. Thinking that the cars that trailed him were much closer, the young man could not control the car, as it skidded over “marbles,” about a quarter of a lap before the finish line. Yet he still managed to finish second.

This year’s dramatic ending adds yet another page to the storied history of this majestic sporting event, where courageous drivers attempt to turn their aspirations into the dream of a lifetime.

Jean Cocteau's Orpheus, Part II (excerpt from my book: Fragments: Essays on Subjectivity, Individuality and Autonomy)

2011-04-11T17:42:00.001-04:00

Cocteau continues to get pounded by the tribunal:

“What, then, is a poet?” they harass him.

The poet answers, “In creating poems, the poet uses a language neither living nor dead spoken by few and understood by few.”

They then go on to ask whether such language is necessary at all. Now, realizing that they already posses the answers which they seek from him, he can no longer hold back and answers, “To contact their like in a world where the exhibitionism of boring the soul is usually practiced by the blind.”

The tribunal is a preventive measure or so the judges claim, whose purpose is to prevent the poet from becoming too distracted from mortal concerns.

They tell him that the worst punishment for a poet would be to live in between two worlds or what a film director would call in “false contrast.”

The tribunal condemns him “to live” and sends him off.

In a satirical vein that is aimed at both, post-modernity and his critics, Cocteau asks Cegeste, “What is this statue that eats autographs?”

To this the young poet answers: “It is the instant celebrity machine. Fame for anyone in a minute or two. Beyond that, of course, it becomes more difficult.”

Vital Counterpoint

2011-04-04T17:05:00.003-04:00

Counterpoint.

The word evokes music: the combining and weaving of different melodic lines in a composition.

     If one takes but a few minutes to consider that human life, when viewed from an existential perspective, is truly a unified, intuitive manifestation of spirit, we will also be rewarded in the realization that authentic existence is a perpetual struggle to ascertain and maintain meaning and a sense of purpose.

      Such strife is a perfect example of a vital counterpoint. Like music, the careful combination of melody and harmony in human existence creates the necessary coherence that can culminate in contentment.

      What we measure in music is the execution of the aforementioned elements. The result – the tangible score - is what we take joy in listening to.

       However, unless we are musicians, we are rarely privy to the pathos that is responsible for the finished piece. Pathos is the guiding spirit of the composer, and thus remains unquantifiable, as a lived and private existence.

       The best examples of philosophical reflection are those that attempt to make sense of human reality through an operative and guiding joy that refuses to be contained by lifeless, soulless abstractions, and pointless pedantry.

       Unfortunately, human existence is never conveyed or understood as a panegyric exercise.

       I cannot help but to invoke Nietzsche: “But to lust after honors in this age is even more unworthy of a philosopher than it was in any previous age: today, when the mob rules, when the mob bestows the honors!”

The reality is that human life is best lived as a self-ruling, autonomous existence. The felt and lived vitality that bespeaks to us of our place in the order of things is no less than a perpetual, drawn out act of counterpoint.

The truth of this is easily recognized as long as one is willing to keep the score. In addition to Socrates’ contention that the unexamined life is not worth living, we must also add that the former can only be achieved through the force of sincere and nuanced convictions.

(exerpt from my novel) Dreaming in the Cathedral

2011-03-12T13:18:00.001-05:00

Table of Contents

Part One

I Dawn

II The Radio Address

III The City

IV The Encounter

V The Church

VI Impending Gloom

VII Deus asconditus

Part Two

VIII The Flood

IX Sea of Uncertainty

X Great Plumes of Atmosphere

XI Sagrada Hostia

XII The Apocalypse

Well, what were your ten overcomings? And what

were your ten reconciliations and the ten truths

and the ten laughters with which your heart edified

itself? Weighing such matters and rocked by forty

thoughts, I am suddenly overcome by sleep, the

uncalled, the master of the virtues.

- Friedrich Nietzsche

The beings who live below,

say that God is on high,

while the angels in Heaven

say that God is on Earth.

- The Zohar

Part One

Chapter one

Dawn

Last night I went to Greg’s funeral.

It had been a long time since I last attended one. Greg was a childhood friend. He lived three houses from me. We attended the same schools until we graduated from high school. His sister, Margaret, was my girlfriend for a brief period during middle school. After that, I went on to graduate from a local college with a degree in computer technology. Greg opened a motorcycle repair shop. Motorcycles had been his fascination from the time he was a young boy. I remember how this hobby was always his parent’s torment. He was broadsided in a local intersection by a car that ran a red light. Greg was killed instantly.

He and I were altar boys from fifth to seventh grade. We volunteered to serve the noonday mass every chance we got. This was a good way of getting out of Ms. Cheevers’ chemistry class. When we weren’t serving mass, we would sit in the pews passing notes to the girls. Greg had perfected a technique whereby he would sleep until it was time to get up and take communion. He would later brag about how he didn’t wake up a minute too soon. He always told me, as he grew older, that for some strange reason he had the best dreams of his life sitting in that church.

I was lucky enough to grow up in a neighborhood where I kept four very good friends, including Greg. On summer nights we would sit outside my house and imagine ourselves twenty years later. After that we would up our antics to thirty and then forty. After that none of us could imagine what the passing years would resemble, so Greg would end this imaginary game by suggesting that it didn’t matter, because the world would have ended by then.

We were all different. I read a great deal, and thus, I was supposed to be the studious one. Greg, too, was fascinated with the stars and planets, a regular topic of discussion for all of us. One of us was a devout Catholic, which for a young man isn’t very difficult to be. Another was called the old man, because he was mature beyond his age. Another friend called himself an agnostic. To this day, I don’t think that any of us understood that word.

The night of the funeral I sat at home and stared at the walls. I found it hard to believe that Greg was gone and the world had not ended. I made myself a gin and tonic and walked out to the yard. It was a clear, warm night just like the ones we enjoyed so many years earlier. I looked up at the stars and tried to imagine any changes that had taken place since those days. Sure, time had passed, but the only changes that I could decipher, I had come to realize, had all taken place within me.

I went to bed.

Tossing and turning for what felt like the entire night, I began to dream what I suppose were many fragmented dreams, the kind that even though incoherent, keep us guessing about their meaning for days on end.

*********

Dawn.

The veil of night was slowly lifting.

The brown, artificial, early morning fog that like an overly protective mother had closely hugged the ground throughout the nighttime hours was now beginning to dissipate. The fog was a mixture of smoke, water vapor and dust, the color of confusion.

Fogilin Solotov was now able to see the devastation clearly. He saw the new world that he was to call his own for the first time since the overnight catastrophe. In the distance, the outline of the larger buildings and the dark shapes of the two, main, intersecting highways that were the heart and soul of this medium-size town, could be seen. However, not a great deal of detail regarding color, shape and texture could be made out, this, given that the city was blanketed by ominous dark clouds that remained very low in the morning sky.

Seeing the light of morning once again was a life-affirming relief for Fogilin. The previous night had been an excruciatingly long one, when sleep was supplanted by a nervous frenzy. He had spent the moonless night alone, walking about his once lively neighborhood searching for survivors.

Fogilin spent the night in a desperate and disheartening state of confusion that had completely rattled the very meaning of his existence. He walked around his neighborhood in an emotionally draining and hopeless circle. He was physically exhausted. Human company was now what he desired most.

The shock and disorientation of solitude was beginning to choke him. Around 5: 00 a. m. he returned to his home covered in sweat, fatigued. He walked slouching forward, like a humpback. Sharp stabs of pain began to make their way through his lower back. Sitting on his front steps, a flashlight in his right hand and tears streaming down his cheeks, he contemplated what had happened.

The fact that he was a grown man meant nothing to him now, for the death and destruction that he had just witnessed was more than any one man’s soul can bear. No adult could have ever prepared for what Fogilin now experienced.

Just a few hours earlier, Fogilin found himself in the quiet stillness of the darkest night he had hitherto seen. Fogilin began to think. Only now, to think meant to survive. He struggled to reflect on all those things, people and events in his life that he had once taken for granted. How he wished he could savor those ever-fleeting moments of his past once again.

But, in reality, these were only warm and pleasant memories now. Looking out into the surreal darkness, where the houses across the street should be, Fogilin realized that his life had changed. He witnessed the kind of quiet tranquility that is only afforded to country people. How long would this maddening loneliness last for? What he did know was that he sat alone in an abysmal darkness contemplating the source, man made or natural of the catastrophe that had changed his life.

Fogilin found himself totally alone for the first time in his life. The greatest torture that loneliness can inflict on humans is that it strips the vitality that is central to the passage of time, making it less real. The minutes were now catapulted into hours, and the hours into an incomprehensible and incongruous eternity.

Time had ceased to be a daily concern. Now his most pressing concern was this oppressive loneliness and existential confusion. He was like someone in a perpetual fugue state. Tired and mentally fatigue, he walked around his neighborhood like a dog searching for a suitable mat to sit on. His emotional condition resembled that of a small child in a doctor’s office, he knew not what to expect.

How much worse would things get? Fear was strangling him into inactivity. Not knowing what to do next, his mind began to drift back into the reality that was yesterday. His life was now confined to his vivid memories, as these grounded his life in a more pleasant objectivity. But the meaning and structure of his memories, too, was about to change. He could no longer tell if he was dead or alive, and what was real or mere illusion. Memories and self-identity began to take on a retroactive look that further removed him from the man that he had known himself to be.

The stifling loneliness remained his only certainty.

Fogilin kept a small battery operated transistor radio that he used to listen to the news and sports broadcasts, as he worked on his yard. His backyard was his refuge away from work, a mail clerk at the downtown law firm of Epstein and Wordsworth. After work he spent a great part of his free time outdoors, working on his lawn, sculpting his trees and shrubs and cultivating his flowers, which included roses, both red and white, tulips and some orchids that he had just recently acquired. This was in essence the very epicenter of his world. His mother’s house was now Fogilin’s cherished home. He went through great pains to keep her garden alive.

The peace and tranquility that he enjoyed as a recluse in his yard, in the middle of a modern city, was also to become an irrelevant and phantasmagoric thing of the past, a mere subjective and very private memory. The entire city had become a surreal and dreamlike setting, one best suited for science fiction, for its desolate peacefulness.

This quiet and seemingly tranquil appearance had now given way to a veil of death and solitude.

The 2011 Grand Prix of Miami

2011-03-08T20:21:00.001-05:00

Few words can describe auto racing as the word “sincerity” can.

In an age dominated by pretension and falsity, when words have been gutted and emptied of all meaning in order to be manipulated by the blind passions and destructive whim of those who like to call themselves “post-modernists,” and who address our time as “post-modernism,” unfortunately, there now remain few areas of life where one can still witness sincerity at work.

However, not all is bleak news coming from the depths of fake and dishonest quarters.

If “post-modern” moral hipsters are going to relish their time in the limelight by imagining that they have re-invented the wheel of human meaning and purpose by deconstructing language, then someone must remind them about that timeless human source of inspiration and sincerity called human action and behavior.

Before there was language, human reality was already busy ruthlessly slamming us around like small vessels in a raging sea.

“Post-Modernists” can benefit immensely from revisiting Aesop’s Fables. It has always been true in human life that actions speak louder than words. No one can deny the stand-alone power of reality.

Now, I am not an auto racing writer. Far from it.

But I am an auto racing aficionado, that is, one of those dinosaurs that actually do things they love and appreciate the intrinsic value of things, events, human values, and people. This is how I approach auto racing, mowing the lawn, or the joy of antique cars…or anything else I do.

The 2011 Grand Prix of Miami was a wonderful event.

Before the race my wife, children, and I were allowed to visit the paddock and pit road. We were given ample time to see both, the Daytona Prototype and GT cars up close. The children took pictures with drivers Scott Pruett and Alex Gurney.

Also, we were delighted when a Grand Am Rolex Sports Car Series official brought us over to Mark Blundell’s #23 car and spent about twenty minutes showing us the inside of that marvelous machine, in great detail.

Afterwards, I told him that I find Grand Am racing very accessible. From past experiences, I can say that all of their racing venues that I have witnessed have been very family friendly events.

And, what a wonderful day it was for racing. The temperature was in the mid 70s, with a strong breeze from the north.

The # 99 Gainsco car piloted by Alex Gurney and Jon Fogarty started the race in the pole position. The Gurney/Fogarty team battled hard, but after a while, fell back to second place, as they were passed by Pruett/Rojas. The Homestead-Miami Speedway is known for chewing up car tires like Godzilla likes ripping out telephone and electric cables.

Of course, the race was as intense as anyone expected. There were many lead changes, including some very competitive and animated driving during the last twenty minutes or so of the race.

Eventually, victory went to Pruett/Rojas, a team that is trying to repeat as champions this season.

Moving about through several areas of the race course, I experienced the beauty and competitive nature of this kind of auto racing in earnest.

What can be more real than people putting themselves in harm’s way, yet doing so with tremendous professionalism, pride, and sincerity?

Jean Cocteau's Orpheus, Part I

2011-02-28T18:03:00.005-05:00

Orpheus is on trial.

“In what form?” some may ask. Through that masterful technique of terror perfected in the twentieth century that negates the possibility for transcendence, and the spiritual freedom of those who seek it.

Orpheus is taken before a tribunal that accuses him of two crimes: innocence, which essentially has to do with “being capable and culpable of all crimes rather than one in particular”; and “repeatedly attempting to trespass in another world.”

Jean Cocteau, the artist and poet, pleads guilty to both crimes. He adds: “I am besieged by crimes I have not committed and have often been tempted to scale that mysterious fourth wall on which men inscribe their loves and their dreams.”
This fourth wall is no doubt an allusion to the fourth dimension, or what has to do with the nature of time itself.

“But why is this? The two members of the tribunal ask. They beg the question.
He answers: “World weary, perhaps, and a hatred of habit. Defiance of the rules…that creativity which is the highest form of humanity’s spirit of contradiction.”

That part of the film is Cocteau’s autobiographical settling of the score with his critics, as it were.

The tribunal then asks: “What then do you mean by film?”
“A film,” he answers, “is a petrifying fountain of thought. A film reviews lifeless deeds. A film permits one to give the appearance of reality to that which is unreal.”
They then continue their analytical assault by asking him, “What do you mean by unreal?”

He answers: “That which lies beyond our meager limits.”
Of course, the tribunal operates as a form of chastisement and not as a sincere appeal to truth.

Like A Jazz Score: A Sense for Life

2011-01-30T14:35:00.004-05:00

Musicians often talk about there being no wrong notes, only notes that one does not intend on playing. This is particularly true of jazz. But even this is positive, if we consider that, at least in jazz, this becomes the impetus to develop and structure improvisation.

If we pay close attention to the vital energy displayed by those who improvise, only then can we really come to understand the freedom that music can convey. Said in a different way, improvisation requires vital energy to take place, and much more to flourish.

I have always found it interesting that the “spaces” that inform the nature of the diatonic notes, should also allow for the free exploration of what are considered “outside” notes.

These outside notes or what are essentially chromatic, from the Greek “chroma,” meaning color are to philosophical reflection what improvisation is to jazz musicians.

This spirited claim is not very difficult to see provided that one work from the inside of these two disciplines. Here, it is worth remembering the saying that one can break the rules only when one knows them. There is a great correlation between genuine philosophical vocation, with the freedom that takes place within or that actually motivates improvisation.

Well, even this seems a little too stiff for what I want to convey. The desire to improvise, either in philosophy or jazz, does not necessarily spring from a quest to break any rules. Such a desire would seem merely sophomoric. Actually, this attitude is one that has corrupted the arts for a long time now.

Instead, the capacity to improvise forces itself on us through the sheer force, and to use another musical term, color of our vocation and vision. Thus, when we are talking about vocation in philosophy or music, we ought not to lose sight of the reality that it is vocation that serves as the impetus to create, in the first place. We have to be careful not to confuse the cause with the effect.

We must also come straight, concerning the fact that the only intrinsic value that talking about music has lies in the capacity of an instructor to teach. The vast majority of what we refer to as “criticism” is hardly valuable at all.

Robison Crusoe and the Terrors of a Technological Dark Age

2010-12-23T09:26:00.002-05:00

When Robinson Crusoe was shipwrecked he brought the values of the civilized world along with him. His solitary companions were his hopes and aspirations, his humanity and his civility. This inner reservoir proved invaluable in his quest for survival.

In essence, it can be argued that Defoe’s masterful work is a study in existential meaning. What can harbor a stronger regard for meaning in human existence than the mere act of survival? Crusoe survived because he had the make-up of the kind of man that could in fact survive such an ordeal. How many people can make this claim?
If we consider that Crusoe’s entire world collapsed rather unexpectedly, leaving him with only his conscious, emotive, and volitional stock to spring meaning into his new life, we can then begin to view this classic work as a reflection on meaning and purpose in human existence. Perhaps only a few other examples of such pronounced individual autonomy can be found in literature – Hamlet quickly comes to mind – and Don Quixote’s metaphysical pursuits being another fine example.

Now, consider that the practice of wisdom in personal life remains the best well kept secret that the vast majority of mankind has yet to uncover.

The Essence of Time

2010-11-11T15:01:00.004-05:00

Time is the greatest essence upon which the poet can focus his measured gaze.

We have watches, we time-in and out at our work place, and we celebrate the New Year with great excitement. But how many of us actually ever capture the essential character and meaning of such things?

That time is only relevant to a cosmic being that is strategically positioned on a planet that is ninety-three million miles away from a life-giving star, this proves this point quite well.

Time measures both, the ultimate reality, and irreality that is human life.
When imprudence attempts to separate this union, it always suffers untold miseries.

To understand this reality is to seek truth and purpose in truly out of the way places, like in those crevices, the essences discovered embedded between two ticks of the clock.

When I think of Borges’ line, “Wine, teach me the art of seeing my history as this were already ashes in the memory,” I cannot help but to think of myself as a small child intuiting the passage of time. This gift, or curse, depending on our temperament, was to become – in fact, has ruled my thought as an adult.

The intuition of time is a gift, without a doubt, because it allows us to witness the fragile state of our being. However, it can also be a curse, by focusing our attention on the essences where truth resides, without readily informing us on how best to communicate our findings.

2010 Homstead-Miami Indy Series Championship Race

2010-10-18T15:53:00.002-04:00

Auto racing is very much like life.

Sometimes the best car does not deliver the best results for the most proficient drivers. Other times the best drivers do very well in less than spectacular cars.

A great lesson to keep in mind is that one can never rule out the power of the human will in competitions of any kind. The exercise of will power in human life – or at least in myopic-life as this is lived today – is one of those maxims of the Aesopian moral kind that remains by all accounts one of those well kept secret of how to handle our day-to-day affairs in the world-at-large.

Of course, on some occasions the best and the not so great drivers alike are equally defeated by that pesky thing known as luck. But this is another question altogether.

The 2010 Homestead-Miami Indy Championship race did not disappoint. In fact, the entire race was a nail-biter. Because the point-differential between first and second place was only 12 points leading up to the Friday of qualifying, the race was very much up in the air until the last minute.
Dario Franchitti is the 2010 Indy Series Champion. He continued to demonstrate his dominance in oval-racing. What I found most interesting in this year’s Homestead-Miami race is how the race unfolded. The first five places went as follow: Scott Dixon won the race; 2) Danika Patrick; 3) Tony Kanaan; 4) Ryan Briscoe and Helio Castroneves finished in fifth.

This race had an abundance of drama from beginning to end. Franchitti began the race in the pole position, and eventually led the contest for about 138 laps. Will Power, who was the overall point leader could finish second and still retain his point lead. Unfortunately for Power, he grazed the wall in the notorious turn four of that race track and had to abandon the race due to suspension problems.

For about half the race the fans stood and cheered their favorite driver. Miami native, Tony Kanaan, received many cheers and applause when he challenged the leader. His battle with Danica Patrick in the last fifteen laps or so was truly exhilarating.

Auto racers are by definition no-nonsense individualist who take life by the horns. They are also admirable in that the standards of accountability that they hold themselves to are not as common in other professions as some people like to believe. This comes as the result of having beliefs and convictions that need must be tested in conditions and situations of life and death.

As I have written elsewhere, auto racing is an honest endeavor that brings out some of man’s most powerfully innate abilities; abilities that can never easily be explained away by an intellectualist and materialist popular psychology.

Man and Objective Reality

2010-10-15T10:14:00.002-04:00

Human reality is untamable regardless of the animated and crafty ways that we employ to deny this fundamental truth. The recognition of this indispensable struggle defines nobility. The problem, however, is that man loves to hide from objective reality and himself. What can be more natural to most of mankind than to spend our days caught in the entrails of make-work, meaningless toil? How else will most people face up to the relentless and unforgiving passage of time?

2010 Toronto Honda Indy

2010-09-06T11:35:00.001-04:00

Sitting in the long straightaway by pit lane, just before honest-to-God hard braking begins before the first turn, I look about me and am delighted by the energy at I am experiencing. The cars zip by me from right to left and slow down considerably at the Princes’ Gate. It is a warm July morning. The sky is infinitely blue, and I feel an occasional cooling breeze coming from Lake Ontario, just yards away.

This is the 2010 Toronto Honda Indy. I have often heard it said that this is a very demanding and unforgiving road course. This is indeed a “wild race,” as this year’s winner, Will Power, described the race. What I witness quickly confirms this. The first turn by the Princes’ Gate is a fine example of the difficult turns and narrowness of this course. Not only do the cars have to brake hard on approaching this right turn, but they often do so two at a time, given that they are coming off a sprint race in front of pit lane and the grandstand. In addition, the first turn is the very point in the course where cars are leaving pit lane. No doubt that drivers feed off of the emotion and excitement of the fans.

Automobile racing is an honest profession, or vocation, as the case may be. Drivers can attest to this. Every profession has those who have embraced it through the sheer force of vocation, and others who merely embrace it as a job. However, I understand that this comparison is only minimally true in car racing.

Again, racing is an honest endeavor. Young men have traditionally raced out of the sheer joy of concurring speed. In many instances, they have done so despite fear. Putting one’s life on the line is a rather honest thing to do. These people put their money where their mouth is. I can immediately think of many professions where people make a living by hiding behind a barrage of cowardly words. Not so in racing.

Race car drivers are admirable people, if only for this basic truth. I had a friend named Al. He was a good student and athletic. Al worked harder as a teenager than most adults in some professions. Al possessed a tremendous moral sense. Our group of friends admired Al. He dreamed of buying and racing a 1968 Camaro. After many difficulties, for Al was not born with a silver spoon, he did get his Camaro. We all celebrated his achievement.

I stand up to watch the cars go past me. To my right, I witness a young boy – eleven or twelve years old – cheering the drivers on. His face is lit with excitement and a specific joie de vivre that is infectious. If bottled, such honest excitement would definitely revolutionize adults and our often drab perspective on human existence. My son, too, is waving the racers on; my daughter covers her ears but smiles earnestly.

The atmosphere before the race was also buzzing with excitement. Racers, as is also true of athletes and soldiers, share an admirable camaraderie, a genuine colleagueship that is blatantly absent from other professions. This comes as the result of having too much at stake. I watch Franchitti and other drivers mixing it up. Castroneves seems to be having a good time. The amicable Tony Kanaan walks around and inspects his car.

Citizen Kane

2010-08-31T13:41:00.003-04:00

Citizen Kane is a film that has been called a lot of things by very man people. It is not necessary to review or catalogue some of these tags here, for in doing so I would simply be falling into the trap that the film has created.

Orson Welles was indeed a clever man. Maybe even too much so for some people. In many respects we can say that Citizen Kane plays with the viewer the same way that another of his cinematic gems – F for Fake - did many years later, in 1973.

And just what is this trap? If we are sincere in giving Orson Welles, the writer, director, producer, film maker and visionary his due, we might also want to face the reality that Citizen Kane is essentially much more than a film. I am not interested in hyperbole, per se, but I do believe that this claim is particularly true of this film.

The few exemplary heights that cinematic art has attained all speak to the very same thing: It is not enough for one to be a director; if in addition, one possesses a philosophical vocation and a chronicler’s nose for uncovering the ins and outs of human reality. Orson Welles is a fine example of this.

Now, the trap, as I see it, is nothing less than ironic. While Welles gives the viewer all the clues that a writer/director can offer a viewer, he does not furnish us with the ability to see. This means that he does not take us by the hand. Unfortunately, the average viewer, especially in this age of pedantic, sophomoric critics and unsophisticated tastes, is reckless enough to fashions theories that coincide with their own anemic ideology and half-baked notions of reality. In the majority of cases this is enough qualification to rip apart the creative effort of others.

Fortunately, the scorn of such critics, while enmeshed in fashionable, intellectual theoretical rituals, never reaches higher than their myopic vision can deliver them. The problem, however, is that these asinine critics propagate like wild fire. This condition is made worst given that some of these people make themselves ridiculous - acting like they are ten feet tall - because they have somehow attained a university degree.

Of course, Welles cherished his ability to tell stories. He took every opportunity to do so. He left us with some timeless works of cinema. His work is highly demanding of the viewer, though. Those not desiring to engage the director on his own terms are often left guessing, much in the same way that children can only grasp a very limited import of the stories told them by their elders.

In many respects, Human existence is well represented by Citizen Kane. In reality, the demands of thought and reflection, philosophical contemplation, and sincere feeling is no different. While some people may make it to old age, this does not mean that some necessarily discard the very same insipid notions of reality that they embraced throughout a lifetime of banging their head against walls.

Citizen Kane is a complex story. Viewers, on the other hand, have the responsibility of being up to par with the storyteller. Anything short of this is just laziness or high flying arrogance. Citizen Kane titillates the viewer with what appear to be conflicting points of view. However, viewer, beware of unduly ambiguity. When we consult the evidence, that is, what is there on the screen before us – and there is plenty of it – the film does not seem too ambiguous.

Ah, but there it is. That word –ambiguity – I suspect that some of the reasons that this great work of art has been considered the greatest film of all time is because today most of the intellectuals who run the planet love the word: AMBIGUITY. This seems to be a response to some otherwise self-serving notions that ironically may have nothing to do Citizen Kane or art to begin with.

Now, I do happen to agree that this is one of the greatest films of all time, but I believe this to be the case for what I see in the film itself, not because I prefer ambiguity over certainty.

Ambiguity, you see, is one of those holy cows, one of those fashionable notions that fuel our age.

Citizen Kane is the story of a very complex man. This man, like others like him in the real world, possesses a joy for life that few people can match. It is as if Charles Foster Kane battled every hour and every minute of his existence in letting others know the essence of his being – never forgetting his looming mortality.

In fact, Kane is motivated by vindicating himself of his past and by projecting himself into the future. What is so difficult to grasp in that? The beauty and genius of Welles work is the manner in which he tells his story.

Without being a mendacious treatise on the passage of time, Kane’s story is best told in moving pictures and utilizing a vital language.

Like Miguel de Unamuno, who is perhaps the greatest chronicler of the Cain and Able story, Kane, too, captures the essence of the life and time of one man. However, while Kane tells his story from the inside out – that is – from a vital, lived understanding of himself, the viewer tries to make sense of it from the outside. Without question, this is always a formula that will leave a true artist frustrated. This is the limit of most art forms, with the notable exception of poetry and existential philosophy.

The average person – that means the majority of people – neither has the necessary intuition nor desire to engage the life of others from the inside. This means that most people’s lives are like stealthy trains passing each other in foggy, moonless nights. Human history verifies this tale over and over, always with the same result.

You see, Kane offers the viewer and the people in his life enough of himself for them to know him quite well by the end of his life. The great tragedy of Kane’s story is that few people were attuned to what he said, much less to what he did, and what he lived for. This is the extent of the driving AMBIGUITY in this film.

In essence Kane’s tragedy is everyman’s tragedy – even though, some men more so than others – we walk the earth like ghosts, where few notice others as being more than necessary acquaintances in the make-work world.

James Gould Cozzens' Novel "Morning Noon and Night"

2010-07-29T11:04:00.009-04:00

On a recent trip to Toronto, Ontario, Canada I had the pleasure of visiting one of my all time favorite book stores. I have been visiting that wonderful store for twenty-two years. The place has books, in hardcover, first-editions that the average reader who reads best sellers cannot even suspect exist.

Climbing the movable ladders that hook around the shelves of this marvelous book store, I always get excited about what I will find. In old book stores one encounters the feel and smell of old volumes, but also a living history of where we have been as people.

Opening books that I may not intend to purchase, but which are alluring nonetheless, I begin to feel my heart pulsating faster. There is nothing more boring for this reader and book collector than the sterile shelves of new book stores.

I search for books and authors that I have been searching for. But I am also very much open to the excitement of being surprised by the sight of books that I have never encountered. I have nothing but pity for those lost souls who today get turned on by those cheesy, nonsensical electronic contraptions and other such aberrations that are strictly designed for non-readers.

I mean, this idea that books show come to us is fallacious. This is rather laughable. Imagine people who think they are entitled to be loved, that love should come to them. People who love learning, knowledge, history, making connections between this and that aspect of human existence do not expect knowledge to come to them. Knowledge is not a right that is offered us by nature or the managers of some bureucratic utopia.

If we want to drink, we go to the river banks or seek a well. This is quite simple. Otherwise, we perish. This is all part of the fundamental understanding that reality is nothing other than resistance to our every whim, passion, desire and aspiration. This is also what makes life so enjoyable for those who understand and cherish it. Ours is an age replete with tragic ironies, isn't it.

Finding other readers to converse with today is a rare thing. Genuine readers are truly rare gems. They are as rare as that mythical white buffalo, or unicorns and sirens. Often, when I come across another reader, I get the strange sensation that I am in the presence of a ghost.

Rummaging through those stacks replete with hardcover books, I came across real gems that I had been searching for: Hemingway, Dos Passos, O'Hara, and several works by James Gould Cozzens that I didn't have.

I have always been a fan of literature. I have found Polish writers to be some of the best exponents of genuine ideas, without having to be pedantic. English literature, especially the romantic and metaphysical writers have excited me since I was a young boy. In addition, American literature, particularly that pertaining to the "lost generation" showcases a great deal of beauty and truth that will stand as a testament to the dignity of the individual in any age to come.

Writers like the aforementioned have a lot that they can offer us today that is valuable in helping us to understand ourselves, as Americans and free individuals. These writers navigate the intersection of philosophical reflection and literature like very few others have.

Imagine my delight to find Cozzens novel Morning Noon and Night. This is a 1968 first edition that has an impeccable dust jacket. The book has been kept in a virtual time capsule.

But, beyond the physical appearance of this particular edition, this Cozzens novel is a superbly original work. Henry Worthington, the protagonist, is the founder of a consulting firm. He narrates how he came to be the man that he is, what he saw in human reality as a young boy, his experiences with other people as an adult, and just what it means to live and die. I dare say that Cozzens is a better philosopher than the vast majority of those who possess an advanced degree in that discipline. [God help us!] Reading him carefully sends us reeling with excitement at the realization that genuine philosophical reflection is alive and well outside of the sterilization and castration that institutions of higher learning have condemned this vocation to.

Worthington tells the reader what life is for him, what it has been, and that he has lived it as if like in a dream.The novel begins: "I have been young and now I am old." Henry Worthington then goes to say that old age does not guarantee wisdom, but he assures the reader that in his case, this indeed is the case. Worthington and Cozzens are both that rare example of men who know their own mind.

In many respects, Cozzens signs out on an age that has not been our own for a long time now, and which will regrettably never return. There is tremendous sadness in Morning Noon and Night. However, this is not the cheap, gratuitous and fashionable sadness, the kind that we prefer to engage in our own age. This novel reminds me of Hemingway's Islands in the Stream for the courage that both of these works display in getting down to the nitty gritty, those difficult to swallow moments of human existence, which no popular appeals to utopia can assuage.

Cozzens does not give us soothing pills to alleviate our spiritual emptiness. On the contrary, he seems to say: "If you are willing to ride along with me, then let us take a walk through fields of natural resistance to all our sophomoric whims."

How many will be willing to embrace this challenge?

What a pity that men of honor, those few souls who deliver us to truth, must perish. And what a shame that fewer and fewer men are capable of taking their place.

Camus and the Order of Reality

2010-06-30T17:23:00.006-04:00

There are no deserts. There are no more islands. Yet there is a need for them. In order to understand the world, one has to turn away from it on occasion; in order to serve men better, one has to hold them at distance for a time. But where can one find the solitude necessary to vigor, the deep breath in which the mind collects itself and courage gauges its strength?

The ebb and flow of time is not today and has never been anything other than a sensual process. To make more of time than just a seasonal explosion of foliage takes imagination, a commitment, and a burning desire that aims to possess time itself, as this flows through us. This is the essence of personal autonomy starring us in the face.

Only the contemplative can truly know the measure of time, as this jester rules over human existence. Yet this is never a secret, given that it takes genuine vocation to know the essence of what it means to grow old, to perish, and to rust. It seems quite obvious to me that modernity – never mind that some are now calling it “post-modernity” - has killed off the nature of possibility and effectively mangled introspection.

What the Romans called gravitas, or what once amounted to a seriousness of purpose, has now given way to “serious” devotion to popular causes. The Greeks taught us well about the nature of masks. Regrettably, today it is information, research, data and the ever debilitating barrage of facts that seem to matter most. These are the sensual gods that offer meaning to daily existence, as if most really know what to keep the score truly means. These are mere substitutes for the absence of a true measure of knowledge – wisdom! It seems that most people are too utterly caught up with the world, as Wordsworth has so eloquently said. We are consumed with the background noise of the material world. Having emptied ourselves of all meaning and purpose, we are now free to play the field, to prostitute our lives to the greatest common denominator: appeal to all things popular.

Flesh and bones decay into the straitjacket of oblivion, leaving behind only a dusting of our former vitality. Not truth, however, my dear friend. I still identify with your narrator’s description of Patrice as one who wished to attain “the sentence that would resolve his anxiety.” The simplicity of this hope is overstated. Patrice quickly learns to decipher that human reality works on several levels simultaneously.

Our world is truly many worlds, let us say. There is the level of what is real, objective and patent, and then there is what is real, but latent and dormant. And in between the two there lies our capacity or lack thereof to decipher reality. This is the great discovery of Patrice’s trek through the world.

2010-05-31T19:16:00.002-04:00

L’Arlesienne Suite No. 1

Part One

The Men

Marching soldiers flare,
Through the town gate
Under a gray and misty mid December sky.
Bound by their manhood,
Their honor and their zest to live
A life of reluctant motion,
For boredom is what they fear most.

They are fragile beings, indeed.
But in war all men are.
Their hearts bleed the blood of uncertainty:
Whether to perish before another day
Or allow to live?
But regardless of their fugue state,
The generals push onward, forward
Into unknown territory,
Perhaps into unknown and unmarked graves.

Reluctantly, the men march,
For stagnation is their initial enemy.

Part II

Hope

When at last the town walls are leveled,
Its people no longer under siege,
The local fighting men, heroes returning home,
Learn to grapple with survival.
For they are fragile entities,
And duty and honor are metaphysical centralities
That they, too, embrace.
Even when outsiders,
Those totally foreign to such intimate concerns might cynically speculate:
“What good is honor and virtue
To he who has no life?”

But cynics are hard men who fail to recognize
That few things matter more,
Than answering to one’s intuitive calling.
For bells toll for all who listen,
And who ready and willing must be.
Failure to answer this voice that beckons from within calcifies the will.

On an old and forgotten grave from another age,
A weary, battle scared soldier reads:
“Every man rides down on a star at birth.
And as disfigured as this star may be,
We must care to honor and cherish it.
But only the fortunate come to know this soon.”

Part III

Death on the Field

As the antagonists are driven backwards,
Away from the town,
Away from innocence,
By men unlike them,
The roar of rifles becomes pronounced.
Like a universal cacophony of misrepresented harmony,
Like the sound created by a piano not well tuned.
In the distance, canons are heard.
Placed high above, on the fortress that protects the town.
Their sound, one equal to that of death,
Or perhaps honor,
This, depending on the view of the fighting men,
Or the hard boiled sigh of the cynic.

Amidst the confusion of this exaggerated romanticism,
A young man falls to the snowy ground,
As those behind him trample onwards to victory.
It is not clear what front he defends.
Yet this does not matter, now
For in battle all men defend the very same inherited human condition,
Either way.

The wounded soldier is carried away by a lovely debutante,
Once the gunpowder,
Has settled over the other bodies.
His face is reminiscent of advancing death.
He fears losing his honor, his manhood,
While it is his life that is at stake.
As she drags his squalid body into a ruined,
Ravished cottage, now
Serving as an active call for universal human suffrage,
He squanders one last thought into oblivion:
“Please… please miss,
Do not let me perish,
Do not let this body feed those earthly maggots.
I must return…I…”
Her tears quickly follow.
They are the tears of a dreamer.
Both, mere children recently released from the womb.

Part IV

The Dance

She sits the dead soldier on a wooden bench,
Casting a greater morbidity on
This death saturated episode in her life.
His head rests against a wall that harbors a fresco of red roses clustered in a field white of lilies.
As she stares into the countenance of young death,
She begins to put on her ballerina shoes,
That she takes from under the wooden bench.
The bench, now converted into a front row seat,
Or perhaps an incubator of life.

After several minutes of pensive solitude,
She begins her slow and deliberate motion,
Uninterrupted by her tears.
Her music? That which only she can hear,
Moves her body into an aesthetics of sincerity.
The light reflected by the milk white clouds,
Enable her to view her movements in anticipation.
In this desperate struggle, when art meets reality,
The limit of our passion is rapidly diminished.
She dances until her state of aplomb ceases her.
But hoping to make the lifeless, listless soldier into a battlelomane,
The dance is never interrupted,
As the sound of death that surrounds her
Resumes its brief cease fire.

Dancing to the music that solely her heart can witness,
She attains to timeless beauty, and the poetry of reality.
She demonstrates a touch of classicism, here, and there
Throughout her emphasis on order and coherence.
She now dances for the fulfillment of an aesthetic of life, and
The revelation that music is as universal,
As war, honor…and death.

Gilgamesh Takes Utnapishtim's Hand

2010-04-23T16:49:00.001-04:00

Humbaba never tires,
Never sleeps.
He struggles to inflict eternal unconsciousness on all,
Especially upon those who have never been self-conscious.

"Enkidu, what men do is nothing,
Nothing, my gentle friend," utters the great Gilagamesh.

Shamash bakes Uruk at midday,
Making the many elders reclining on the rocks, those
Conferring on the shores of the mighty Euphrates, nervous.
And why not?
After all,
“The plan of that man-child is overzealous,” they utter:
To fight the natural order, to overthrow destiny,
To revolt against death!
That unthinkable guile of his,
This young man's vanity.
Does he pretend to uncover the ways of immortality?
Is this not a rather dangerous notion?
Wouldn't any sensible man think so?

"He's too overly impressionable,
He'll get himself killed," the elders all agree…”

Once again,
Darkness falls over the majestic river,
As a raven descends from the entrails of Anu.

All this
As the bull of heaven
Knocks Enkidu
Senseless to the ground.

Gilgamesh swallows hard, nervously,
His palms cold and sweaty:
“This is the struggle and the eternal strife,” he reminds himself.

He pleads with life for answers:
The cause and whereabouts of endless effects,
Only to find more timely questions.

Enkidu's life passed him by like the influence of the Sun on a winter day,
Not knowing how, what, where, and why.
A mere child he.

"Utnapishtim, you have seen life,
Ea is your protector, your friend,
Please tell me why?
Give me your gentle word, old sage of Shurrupak,
I must know why.
Share your wisdom, why don't you?"
Gilgamesh begs the old sage.

"You should not have come here,
You must not have entered my kingdom, boy.
My boatman shall pay a heavy prize for bringing you here.
You have shattered my peace."

"But tell me, please,
For it is eternal life I seek," shouts Gilgamesh, now
The tears flowing down his youthful, red cheeks.

"Young man, return to your people,
They await you in fear.
They fear for your very life.
You cannot desire that which you do not understand."

"But Utnapishtim, I cannot bear the weight of my friends' death,
I must understand or die."

"My gentle Gilgamesh, you have offended Ishtar,
Queen of heaven.
You have laughed in the face of her father, Anu,
God of the sky.
Great danger you have sought,
Your very life is now in peril.
You must leave here, at once."

"But, wise one, please understand,
Has not my life always been like a feather in a storm?
It is life,
Oh, wise one, that offends us all."

"That is the law of the world, my boy.
You must learn to embrace, to accept.
Do we make houses to last forever?
And do not flood waters recede eventually?
Then, why must you live forever, young one?"

"Because master,
I am Gilgamesh.
I am no other,
I am I."

Dancing Bears and Trained Monkeys Deck the Halls of La Maison de la Culture (In Memory of Philip Larkin

2010-04-17T08:43:00.005-04:00

I hear Philip Larkin, laughing
Rollicking, frolicking,
Wondering if the gates came tumbling down,
Or were they merely left open?

Often, from the librarian's illustrious desk
Frightfully silly seems the world
Of man,
Of books, reviews, anthologies
And the like.

Thus, gratefully so,
Yours was the gift of aesthetic vision, this,
Humanely coupled with an
Innate clarity best suited to smell human folly.

*Philip Larkin (1922-1985). Poet, writer, jazz critic, and librarian at Hull University England.

The View From an Impressionistic Eye

2010-03-09T19:53:00.003-05:00

Fate is an indiscriminate mother who claims her children following the same line of logic from which she fashions us. No one can evade the order that she has prescribed. Her children need not suspect this. They rarely do.

Early morning is always the best time to take in the essences that make up the human world. Nighttime is when we do the math.

Sure, there have been plenty of manifestos written about the irreality of reality and about the essential order of human existence. These have included in their ranks a stubborn negation of the intuitive character of life and how this relates to the biological box.

And, sure enough, we sit back and debate…and debate, and debate some more until some – rarely the morally worthy – convince themselves of their guru status.

No One is a Prophet in their Own Land

2010-02-18T14:04:00.002-05:00

The expression, “No One is a Prophet in their Own Land” can apply to many aspects of human life: A father offering advice to his children, a teacher who tries to impart a moral/spiritual lesson to a student or one who offers counsel to a friend.

Yet this expression perhaps does not have better use than when applied to the work of thinkers and writers. There are several reasons for this, I will suggest.

Thinkers and writers who remain in a town or city and who exercise their vocation as adults in such familiar confines are the worst off. These poor souls are in a very disadvantageous position.

Depending on the size of the town or city, such thinkers and writers will encounter a frigid audience to their thought or writing. This comes about from nothing other than familiarity. People who have known these thinkers and writers will continue to address them, not as they are as adults, but rather as they remember them in their youth, in the past. Isn’t this what happened to Jesus, the boy carpenter, when he returned home? This is unfortunate for the thinker or writer because they will eventually become frustrated by the fact that there is very little that they will be able to offer to others in such a town or city.

Equally, for others who have not grown up in the town or city that they reside in as adults, will encounter similar rebuffs. For one, some people will see them as outsiders. Others will cite the questions or concerns that such a thinker or writer brings up as things that they too are privy to. In other words, whatever a thinker thinks or a writer says will be attacked – or worse, ignored – by others, the critics, because they believe themselves equally capable and qualified to offer their own take on the matter in question.

Of course, this is not only a problem that has to do with our place of residence, but also takes place in families, with acquaintances, in the places that one frequents and in our place of employment.

Other, yet more potent reasons to consider, why no one is a prophet in their own home, have also everything to do with central components of the human condition: Envy, resentment and laziness quickly come to mind.

In these cases, some people are ill-equipped to tie together the strength of character of a thinker or writer with other staple characteristics of their temperament, like the ability to handle serious questions and concerns in a manner that does not allow oneself to become pedantic, self-directed or vain.

In other words, because some people cannot understand that some serious thinkers and writers do not showcase themselves morbidly serious all of the time, this will undoubtedly disqualify the thought, work and writing of some very inspired people in our midst.

With Enough Time

2010-02-15T15:05:00.001-05:00

In public affairs, there is so little reliance on truth among men that one cannot do without an attorney in order to make truth prevail. The claim to truth is turned into a weapon even of falsehood.

- Karl Jaspers
Philosophy of Existence

With enough time, a clear head and good will can make sense of the immense contradictions that men proudly embrace. Situating ourselves under a shade tree and enough leisure time is enough to allow us sufficient understanding and wisdom to last us ten lifetimes.

With enough time, those who seek truth and understanding can learn to laugh at the world of morally and spiritually atrophied men: The Lilliputians who try to pass themselves off as people of substantial moral/spiritual stature.

With enough time, the very essences that inform human existence, and how this vital reality corresponds to that outer reality, the world, bubble safely to the top of our muddled, twenty-first century existence.

With enough time, the confused aggravation that dictates the rhyme and reason of most lives today can be ironed out and made to evoke a sense of divinity and purpose that otherwise most men do not even suspect.

With enough time, we will come to understand that the innocence of the child ought to be safeguarded, at the risk of death, from those vile and debased people who deal in evil and suffering.

With enough time, one can uncover the driving force behind evil that tries to pass itself off as good by denying that evil does not exist. This is the same kind of evil that seeks to do “good” for the community, for the collective, for mankind. Ah, there go with all those contradictions, once again.

With enough time, life - our own - the only one that we can ever feel and embrace from the inside out, without committing all-encompassing fallacies of abstraction, will reveal its very secrets to us.

With enough time, we learn that the Barnum and Bailey, Felliniesque world of man’s most cherished crutches: appearance and pretense, eventually give way to naked and vulnerable souls who grasp for the order and purpose of their miserable lives, but who come up empty. In the end, if we have enough time and a fine shade tree, we discover that all manner of lies, appearances and pretenses always become unveiled. As those in our wolfish press core today like to say: Everything becomes exposed.

With enough time, we cannot help seeing the futility and suffering brought on themselves by those who live lives of self-loathing and self-directed lies.

With enough time, I have no doubt about this, truth will bring together all those loose elements of existence that most men refuse to make inventory of.

With enough time, we learn to sing a song that assuages our sweat in making sense of the trivial and pointless lives that most people shamelessly embrace.

With enough time and a broad shade tree, the reflective soul comes to find that all genuine power is always power over the will. Ah, but what irony, this is the ultimate, yet foundational truth of all social/political arrangements.

With enough time, the reflective soul comes to the understanding that the greatest knowledge that can be attained is self-knowledge; when the self becomes bored and tired with external knowledge, and instead seeks to objectify itself in the world, in the full splendor and confidence that self-conscious life ought to be master of itself.

With enough time and a loyal shade tree…unfortunately, free time is precisely what most men fear. And, as for shade trees…these are no longer the arbiters of a reflective life, but rather a menace, a mirror to the wayfaring life of self-indulgence and sensuous pleasures.

Cell Phones, iPhones, iPods, MP3’s and Enough Banality to Fill Five Lifetimes

2010-02-09T10:16:00.001-05:00

It was not too long ago that one could witness people reading books and newspapers in public places.

At airports, train terminals, in doctor’s offices, even at the beach, one could see people reading. After all, reading is a form of diversion, a celebration of leisure. But now it seems that in the span of the last four years or so things have really deteriorated in this respect.

Today, books and newspapers have quickly given way to cell phones, iPhones, and other electronic gadgets. One only has to walk around a university campus to encounter this hemorrhage of banality that has become pandemic today. This is particularly troubling when we consider that youth is a time of planning one’s life course. Of course, I am open to the chastisement of our progressive moral/cultural gurus, that today’s youth is a breed of their own. This, they truly are indeed.

While some time ago students would wait for class to begin outside their classrooms reading a book, preparing for class, today they are busy, obliviously hacking away “texting” or mindlessly chattering away on their newly found, electronic, satellite assisted, time-killing devices. What the gurus cannot comprehend, however, is that there is more to this existential emptying of the soul than meets the eye.

But the electronics mania is hardly a spiritual disease that afflicts the young only. Those of us who walk around the world with open eyes and ears have also seen how the old, those formed in another time, those who might be granted the benefit of the doubt to know better, are also contaminated by the ravages of our nihilistic youth.

It might be worthwhile for us today who are blinded by the sensual delights of our hedonistic age to understand that just as there are diseases of the body, the soul too can become a source of malignant infirmities.

Ralph McInerny's The Relic of Time

2010-02-02T15:36:00.003-05:00

The Relic of Time is a follow-up novel to Ralph McInerny’s The Third Revelation, but it is not a sequel. The novel is about the theft of the cloak with the Image of Our Lady of Guadalupe from the shrine that houses it in Mexico City. This brazen act has scandalized Mexicans, who venerate their Lady of Guadalupe.

Retired CIA operative Vincent Traeger is asked to try to recover the cloak.

The novel traces the relationship between good and evil in the modern world. Without giving the plot of the novel away, I can say that The Relic of Time explores themes of morality and Catholic spiritually in such an informed and respectful manner that few writers today are capable of tackling.

McInerny’s novels are a fresh substitute to other best selling, yet highly sinister and clichéd popular novels that deal with fantastic and bogus tales of the Catholic Church. Reading this work, one always has the sure-footed impression that in the end there will be some redeemable event or message that will double the reader's pleasure.

Ralph McInerny (1929-2010)

2010-02-01T15:55:00.002-05:00

Ralph McInerny’s The Third Revelation is a supremely intelligent novel. The book is a murder mystery, as are so many other of McInerny’s works of fiction. Most notably of these is his Father Dowling Mysteries series.

The Third Revelation has Our Lady of Fatima’s revelations as its plot vehicle. This is the first of The Rosary Chronicles novels. But beyond the intricacies of plot line, The Third Revelation delivers the reader into the nature of evil, as few people today can imagine it. One of the things that McInerny does so well as a novelist is present the Vatican and the Catholic Church in a light that is not cheapened by the glare of book sales. While other writers and publishers have made it a cottage industry in attacking sheepish Catholics, McInerny takes the time to explain the main tenets of the faith.

Ralph McInerny is a historian of the Catholic Church. He was also Professor of Philosophy at Notre Dame University from 1955 to 2009. Among his most memorable books of non-fiction we find: The Defamation of Pius XII, Miracles: A Catholic View and What Went Wrong with Vatican II: The Catholic Crisis Explained.

It is commendable to witness a first-rate novelist entertain and enlighten the reader without having to prostitute himself to the devilish ways of publishers, the temptations of mammon or the call to embrace timely, fashionable theories or ideology.

White Innocence

2010-01-29T16:23:00.001-05:00

The innocence of children is something that we should protect at all cost. The fresh conception and attitude that healthy children have of the world should serve as a model for adults.

The humility of children, Jesus tells us, is a characteristic that enables adults to enter into the kingdom of heaven. Jesus, the worldly stoic, reminds us: “Be Wise as Serpents and Innocent as Doves.” Moreover, humility, I will suggest, is also a very practical and timely value to embrace, right here, in the spatial-temporal realm.

For one, humility allows us to dust off the banality and evil of the vilest human elements that inhabit the globe without recourse to altering our moral/spiritual good will (of course, I mean whenever this is the case). The opposite of the former is precisely the shameless, Janus-faced banality that runs the day-to-day world.

Also, humility means that one is either inwardly content with our lot in the world and our moral/spiritual constitution or that we are not very moved by the things that motivate arrogant, cocky, self-centered people.

Living with the innocence of the child also means that one is not self-conscious about engaging in the games that others find so meaningful. The timeless, lightness of being of the child allows adults to be in the world without having to be of the world. This keeps our feet and hearts away from the perennial mud of the social world.

The Godfather Effect: The Cultivation of Appearance and Pretense

2010-01-28T10:45:00.007-05:00

Both Erasmus and Nietzsche, amongst a great number of other thinkers and writers, have made a verifiable case for the belief that man actually is not predisposed for truth. Ortega, too, gently chastises Aristotle for arguing that "all men desire to know."

As far as Ortega y Gasset is concerned, most men never even come close to caring to engage in a life of truth-seeking.

Well, let's be sincere. An informal survey of the world, today or in the past, quite quickly confirms this truism. Food, shelter, procreation, or the process thereof, is what moves must men. Living the moment, often in a very trivial and banal way - I am not even suggesting a glance at carpe diem - is the most soothing life for most men.

And...come to think of it, this is hardly a problem that should concern a morally sound person. Good, moral/spiritually individuals, families and societies can flourish very well without having to require a reflective, philosophical temperature - vocation is actually a much better word.

Again, let those amongst us who live - and who are prepared to lose much that is dear to us in the eyes of others - by embracing sincerity, rejoice for not being feeble of spirit or virtue.

Moral goodness - a good heart, as simple people like to say - measures success in the manner that a person's life unfolds. Consistency is the essence of good will. Let us be sincere with ourselves, even though man has rarely found sincerity a popular value worth embracing.

What is truly daunting and debilitating to individuals, families and society is not the privation of a reflective temperament, but the celebration of the values: Seeming, Pretense and Appearance. Unfortunately, these false values fuel the engine that runs the social/political machinery of our demoralized world. We verify this truth every day ten thousandfold.

When people get it in their heads that they will promote others because of self-interest, and regardless of qualifications or moral uprightness, this, then, is the worst form of appearance that most people feel comfortable with. The key element in all of this is self-interest. When people serve the role of Godfather to decrepit, immoral or simply incompetent people, they do so as a recognition of likeness to themselves. Otherwise, the moral/spiritual imperative would prevail.

This is precisely where the injustice of the Godfather Effect kicks in: By neglecting the moral goodness and aptitude of those who, because they are sincere, create a mirror to those who are morally debased.

Again, unfortunately, the latter run the social/political world of seeming, make-believe, the Barnum and Bailey world of appearances. But because the weight of appearance is a great temptation that most men kneel before, moral goodness has to struggle, work tremendously diligently just to earn the right to breathe the same air that the for-show-men...and women, those denizens of appearances and pretense have contaminated.

The Raven and the Dove: A Parmenidian Dialectic

2010-01-27T17:07:00.003-05:00

The Raven and the Dove:
A Parmenidian Dialectic

1

Night is mankind’s suffering in disguise,
For simple doves that aim to live, yet die,
For night is coy and quick to mesmerize,
That dove, blind to the Raven’s death knell sigh,
For life, like a soft shadow fades and fades.
But is not life an everlasting dark night?
We, never finding pure joy in its shade,
Spreading until our humble soul takes flight.
For man is always innocent and mild,
Hence death’s shadow is ruler of life’s pain,
Forging all mortal life with coerced smiles,
But perpetual night, which frightens, remains.
Is not the Raven brother to the Dove?
Gentle lover of the heavens above.

2

Night and death choke and our passion constrain,
Both are part of the darkness that breeds man,
Carrion for the raven’s scorn, disdain,
Flesh eater who knows not joy, but quiet ends.
Left alone to witness life’s chasm of doom,
Frail innocence knows not its own tragic fate,
As children born into cold sterile rooms.
The raven stalks without apparent haste.
Yet what being can know his predestined lot,
Is man not a conscious shadow of life?
To mankind, reflecting on his soiled plot,
No doubt existence is but mortal strife.
What may still be sacred and respected?
Though the raven is always rejected.

3

Night is that macabre and lonely time,
That sublime eternal cry when hearts throb,
When phantoms rule over our heart and mind,
And lonely children quickly learn to sob.
Thus what is man, but he who is once born?
Is not the womb but a black-feathered foe?
For in nature all grows with painful thorns,
As we stoically must life forgo,
With fragile purity purged of life’s pain.
Existence, a mystery whose glare fades,
However, often precious, as rare jades.
Night is that shadow that none will dare fain,
Always frightful, forbidding, and freezing,
The pathos of thoughts and words worth speaking.

The League of Anti-Gravity Men...And Women

2010-01-22T16:55:00.006-05:00

If you can’t dazzle them with brilliance, baffle them with bull.

- W.C. Fields

The POW-WOW ended after seven weeks of relative seclusion.

The international press was informed that those who attended the meeting came from all walks of life. The news agencies were respectful to be inclusive. They emphasized the part about “all walks of life.”

However, internal leaks proved the situation to be otherwise.

After the event was over one source who became very disenchanted with the meeting informed the press that the International conference was really made up of three-thousand university professors and activists. Their expenses for the seven week stay in Montreux, Switzerland and other places in that lovely, serene, perennially neutral country were assumed by their respective universities, philanthropists and State-sponsored Humanities grants.

The attendees of the International Conference of Committed Professionals who love the Earth and all non-Human Creatures and who Seek Freedom from the Oppression of God, Consciousness, and Human Autonomy (ICCPEHCSFOGCHA) were all adamant about the need to sacrifice their daily affairs back in their respective universities in order “to safeguard man’s future from the ravages of stupidity and himself.”

The press interviewed some of the participants.

One, a Dr. Matilda Bustamante Pestepecho wept before the camera, for, as she said: “Mankind cannot continue to bear the weight of gravity upon its feeble chest.”

The interviewer looked at the camera and remarked: “This is the predominant sentiment of those committed professionals who have come from around the globe to attend this life-affirming meeting.”

Dr. Pestepecho then pleaded with the television audience to understand the fact “that the participants of the meeting cannot complete their cutting-edge work without the involvement of a dedicated, caring, self-less humanity.” After a pause to blow her nose, she added: “We cannot save the world alone.” The interviewer reiterated her impassioned pledge, asking: “All of you passively watching, please find it in your hearts to support the vital work of these genuine visionaries.”

Then the interviewer presented the American billionaires, Billy D. Fence and Charron Tuppet. Both men admitted their guilt in not doing more to promote this worthy cause. At that moment the interviewer apologized to the two philanthropists by informing the audience that each had contributed five-hundred million dollars.

Inside the great meeting hall a speaker stressed the importance of continuing his research into “enlightenment era bourgeois oppression of granting gravity such a prominent role in human reality.”

Dr. Harvey I. Talkstein banged his papers onto the podium and shouted: “Enough. Where is the definitive proof that gravity exists?” The audience gave him a six-minute standing ovation.

At that point, the attendees broke for lunch until 4:45 p.m.

At 5:00 p.m. a new session began titled: “The God Industry’s Infringement into Relative Values, Human Pleasure and the Anarchic Agent who desires to Explore his Private, Spontaneous Truth: Hedonism in the Modern World; Alternative lives in a Logo-centric World-order that Suffocates, Alienates and Disenfranchises the Private Desires of the Innocent Victims of Capitalism, Corporatism and the Fascist Time-Honored Mythology of Familial-Values.”

Because of the complexity and demanding importance of this lecture, this session was presided over by fifty professors, each responding to a given section of the twenty-two page paper that was read.

They were careful to explain and make the paper vibrantly relative to the ideals of those in the building and around the world. All of the sessions in the first three weeks were broadcast live on public radio and television stations worldwide.

The remaining four weeks of sessions were held in café’s, restaurant, spa’s, secluded, “places of healing,” in modest boats in Lake Geneva, and in the homes of various world leaders who were gracious enough to lend their seasonally vacated homes to this worthy, world-altering, conscious-building cause.

Corrosive Cynicism

2010-01-19T13:32:00.003-05:00

Now, how can intellectuals serve as guides for society when their docility toward the whims of fashion on average exceeds that of other members of society? One is, indeed, struck by the conformism of intellectuals, the frequent lack of originality in the appreciations they display as a social group, and the collective witlessness with which they have rushed headlong to embrace the latest philosophical fads, particularly since World War II.

- Jean-François Revel

To the philosophically and spiritually healthy person, cynicism surfaces as the leading cause of moral fragmentation in our lives today. As an ancient doctrine, cynicism was suspicious of the inherent worth and purpose of man’s plight through the spatial-temporal world. But as a modern phenomenon, and most importantly as a way of life, the form of cynicism that has plagued man post the second half of the twentieth century, is now all-pervasive.

Cynicism exhibits many root causes. Some of these spring from questions of personal temperature, social-political motives, disappointment and disenchantment with our respective life trajectories, or even, as we have witnessed most recently, an expedient and self-serving manner of turning human reality on its head for the promulgation of infinite varieties of hedonism. Cynicism is a moral-articulate mechanism for the defense of purposeless egoism.

If the causes attributable to cynicism are said to be many – and these continue to grow in direct proportion to the self-contradictory spread of competing forms of hedonism - so too, are its destructive effects. The ancient cynics practiced a kind of cynicism - a form of autonomous repose, we can say - that while recognizing the futility of man’s social world as a form of a laughable, Fellinesque spectacle, nonetheless sought caution in the cultivation of the understanding, as this exercises control over the self.

Yet ancient cynicism remained reflective, sentimental and romantic. It was also constructive in its ability to re-direct human vital energy away from the mundane and fleeting. By today’s standards, this seems very quaint and child-like in its purity of intention and execution.

Post World War II cynicism is vile and destructive not only of institutions, our ability, desire and need to found human existence on the guiding principles of truth, conscience and a good will, but also in the way that it slashes out and stumps on the aforementioned. Today cynicism is not content to exist as a quasi-withdrawal from the world; it demands to be allowed to raise its incoherent voice against all professed life-affirming values. Where for the ancient cynics the search for truth often delivered them to life-guiding wisdom, today’s cynics have succeeded in dismantling both truth and wisdom as viable vehicles of grounding the human condition in cosmic reality. What can be more anathema to the practice of hedonism than the cohesion brought about by the sincere search for self-knowledge?

Like the awe-aspiring Icarus who does not heed his father’s, Daedalus, advice to maintain moderation in the exercise of his newly found wax wings, the intemperance that is the staple quality of contemporary cynicism plunges us ever further into the depths of our future embodiment as barbarians. Cynicism, like an all-pervasive corrosive, corrupts all aspects of man today. This destructive force echoes and is felt in personal relationships that were formerly ruled by mutual respect and love.

The idea that culture should act to lift human aspirations from the merely sensual to moral and spiritual transcendence has given way to the absence of a unifying imagination which showcases its failure as the mere exercise of vile biological passions. Today’s cynicism is the result of existential bankruptcy and self-loathing.

Concerning questions of literature, philosophy and the humanities, cynicism has become the representative modus operandi of seemingly pent up, primitive passions. This is an odd condition to find ourselves in after at least twenty-five hundred years of steady cultural creations that have liberated man from the most negative aspects of our raw and unadulterated “natural” condition. Having given up on all forms of transcendence and whatever institutions that have traditionally allowed us to seek this, today cynicism’s ability to offer us moral deliverance is a cause celebre.

In order not to be left behind in our incessant race to establish the latest, most timely installment of that perennial and timeless hedonism, we continue to make long strides in our self-conscious refusal to feel shame.

Ours is a mankind-altering era. Of this we can have no doubt. The new man, the one who rules par excellence over all aspects of human existence today, is quickly coming to resemble pre-articulate man. Is this perhaps what took place before written history?

Cynicism has subsumed human life to the inner fog of Pandora’s Box, pinning all against all, and everyone against himself. Undoubtedly, our moral-existential bankruptcy seeks causes and activities that fill its fundamental void. Human existence has been turned into a self-mutilating colossal form of base appearances and pretense. Ours will undoubtedly be seen by future generations as the age of the radical ideologue. How sophomoric and horrific it will seem to future people - after we have destroyed ourselves with progressive moral and spiritual experimentation – that our age negates the life- affirming and meaningful, yet life-consuming and dignified work of practicing personal autonomy.

We have traded human autonomy and liberty for the expedient whims that define the human condition for the superfluous and hollow activity of the social-political. This is a symbol of an atrophied imagination.

When we truly come to understand Ortega y Gasset’s 1930 contention in The Revolt of the Masses that man exists today as a demoralized entity, only then can we come to the realization of the prophetic and visionary power of sincere philosophical vocation. This constructive glance toward the future can only be attained by the refusal to ground human existence in social-political historicity. Cynicism’s lasting legacy is its stranglehold on our ability to refresh ourselves as differentiated individual entities on a daily basis.

Fahrenheit 451: A Novel of Autonomous Ideas for a Time of Non-Reading Automatons

2009-12-31T12:18:00.004-05:00

Francois Truffaut’s Fahrenheit 451 begins with a striking narration of the film’s credits. The premise is simple: talk becomes the natural medium in an illiterate state. When the firemen, that is, the book burners, arrive at a high rise with orders to burn books we are immediately struck by the stark and vulgar aesthetics of the buildings that are so typical in totalitarian countries — globs of spiritless, unimaginative, state-commissioned modernism.

This drab and socially engineered reality is beautifully contrasted with the imaginative ways in which readers hide their books: one rests in a ceiling lamp, more are found in a hollowed out television set, and others in the tight confines of a heater. It is difficult to imagine a greater realism than this depiction of the double morality — the duplicity forced on its citizens by totalitarian systems.

Fahrenheit 451 is much more than an allegory of the future, and the dangers that lurk for modern man. In many respects, the film as well as the novel, are studies of a type of human temperament that revolves around an anti-humanism that prides itself in destruction.

If there was ever a type of government that succinctly and successfully institutionalized mass schizophrenia, clearly we do not need to look further than the twin murderous ideologies of the Twentieth Century: Communism and Nazism. In terms of the moral double-dealing that these systems of terror thrive on, consider what Arkady Shevchenko, United Nations Under Secretary General and former advisor to Soviet Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko, wrote after his much-publicized defection to the United States in 1978: "So I had become part of the stratum that tried to portray itself as fighting what it coveted. While criticizing the bourgeois way of life, its only passion was to possess it; while condemning consumerism as a manifestation of philistine psychology, a result of poisonous Western influence, the privileged valued above all else the consumer goods and comforts of the West. I was not immune. The gulf between what was said and what was done was oppressive, but more oppressive still was what I had to do to widen the gap. I tried to remember everything I ever said, and what others had told me, because my survival and success depended greatly upon that. I pretended to believe what I did not, and to place the interests of the Party and the state above my own, when in fact I did just the opposite. After I had lived that kind of life for years, I began to see Dorian Gray’s real picture in my shaving mirror."

The great confusion that has been propagated by most commentators of Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 is to neglect that he wrote the novel in 1950, precisely as a vivid commentary on Stalin’s communist Soviet Union. As a vivid example of what Bradbury has in mind, let us consider how Shevchenko describes his discovery of bookstores in one of his diplomatic forays to New York: “But for me, the crown, the jewel, of the great city was its bookstores. If I had been allowed, I would have spent all my time in them. The variety of titles, including Russian-language books by Soviet émigrés and defectors, was seductive, almost overpowering.” His appraisal is an honest discovery by someone who is privileged by a doctrinal and totalitarian ideological zest for coercion. Much has been concocted by critics having to do with superficial and fantastical future worlds, and future book burners without truly arriving at the essence of either the book or the film.

Unamuno's Novel Niebla

2009-12-28T18:53:00.002-05:00

The afterlife or what is considered our longing for immortality is an existential staple concern of human existence. Some people can fool themselves, in this, our technological and nihilistic time in believing that perhaps it is best to dispose of all those heavy, metaphysical concerns. Yet existential concerns are not theories or games that we can easily do away with. Such questions force themselves onto our lives precisely because they are essential to the human condition, that is, to life and death.

Anderson-Imbert’s story, El Fantasma explores the gulf that inhibits communication between the living and the dead, and the dead with each other. This is an interesting line of thought that brings to mind Miguel de Unamuno's 1914 novel, Niebla (Mist).

In Mist man is existentially cut off from his peers by an incessant nihilism, thus the mist, which engulfs man along with all his hopes. Unamuno argues that the best antidote to our “tragic sense of life,” which takes control of all our aspirations is found in the hope of eternal life.

The final word on human life, however, Unamuno unabashedly tells us, is that the very consciousness that establishes the I-pole of human existence proves nothing other than that human existence, which is essentially always grasped as a unique subjectivity, is no less than a mystery.

So, after all is said and done - human life - the vital life that we feel trickling through us can never be assuaged or explained away by theories or the fancy of gurus, witch doctors or academic fashion-mongers.

Keywords:
Unamuno, after life, immortality, literature.

I.M. Peterson's Novel Future Days

2009-12-24T13:41:00.003-05:00

It is very difficult to summarize and classify such a complex work like I.M. Peterson’s Future Days. Is the novel social science fiction? Is it Imaginary fantasy? Magical realism, perhaps? I opt for none of the above. Instead, Future Days reminds me of Jean Raspail’s 1975 novel, The Camp of the Saints. It is also similar thematically to my novel Dreaming in the Cathedral.

One can write volumes about Peterson’s novels, as well as his essays, but most of what can be said must be so fresh, so unlike every other tired, burnt-out cliché that most literary critics embrace today, that reviewing his work becomes a truly exhilarating task in our banal and mediocre age.

Because I.M. Peterson’s novel’s are the work of a gifted thinker who stresses the life-affirming virtue of individual autonomy, his readers have come to think of him as one who understands that man cannot return to meaning and purpose without first opting for a vision of transcendence.

Future Days finds man living in an age when gender differences are deemed unconstitutional by the ruling body of sociolinguists and psycho-technocrats, who advice the council of five, the legislative body that makes up the One-World Government. Sex is seen as being purely incidental. It is merely a biological tool that comes into fruition for sanctioned procreation on demand by the government, as it sees fit. Because the One World government has implemented a policy of depopulating the planet, child birth is a rare occasion.

This is hardly a problem, however, for women are made infertile at puberty in order to safeguard their competitive edge with boys. The few children that are born annually are taken to government-run “farms,” where they are routinely brought up in communes run by women. These children are called “the guardians of the state.”

Just when the god of technology has begun to exhaust itself by creating such empty lives that people can no longer be told apart one from another, an asteroid hits central Europe.

Future Days, as is obvious from some of the themes it employs, is a dark novel that depicts a dark age of technology, or what is referred to by the council of five, as “God’s dystopia.” The interesting thing about Future Days is that the narrator has the council of five passing a decree that stresses: “No longer can man be unhappy.” I read this with a smirk, as I think of Stanislaw Lem’s notion in A Perfect Vacuum: “Technological development means the ruin of culture? It provides freedom where hitherto reigned the constraint of biology? But of course it does!” then Lem adds, utilizing his gift for parody. “And instead of shedding tears over the loss of our captivity, we should hasten our step to leave its dark house.”

Maxims

2009-12-16T14:37:00.007-05:00

There is in us a tendency to locate the
shaping forces of our existence outside
ourselves.

- Eric Hoffer

I often wonder how many people today are capable of deciphering the eternal truths contained in maxims? And of those, how many are willing to live, to exercise the guiding essence of such truths?

1) Sitting under palm trees, I look up at the sky in awe. The world slips by unnoticed. Through the gaps in the green fronds, the infinite blue sky beckons the imagination to gasp. If only we could hold an infant’s hand through the pangs of infinity? I simply stare and wonder.

2) Time travel seems redundant, for what more time do we need than the infinite life we are allotted.

3) At dawn we pinch ourselves and marvel at being alive; at dusk we wonder if it is all real.

4) Constrained by time, we swim out with the current only to be delivered back to our point of departure.

5) To write is to amuse and delight ourselves with the order of time.

6) It is a major miracle that anything at all is ever recalled.

7) Grasp, man... grasp! For, when one day your hands become feeble - then - you will only know regrets.

8) People-watching is always greatly amusing. It is certainly more fruitful than to study them.

Herta Müeller: 2009 Noble Prize in Literature

2009-12-11T15:17:00.002-05:00

The 2009 Noble Prize in Literature went to the Romanian writer Herta Müeller. Even though at the moment she is not very widely read, she is a writer who is deserving of the award.

It seems like a very long time since the Swedish Academy has awarded this prize based solely on talent, as well as the peace prize, and not for extra political reasons. The Swedish Academy is responsible for committing major indiscretions and guffaws in the past. Unforgettable, for instance, is their snubbing of Jorge Luis Borges. In the present, we can easily see where they have gone wrong in also ignoring Mario Vargas Llosa. I suppose that in our time of moral/spiritual Lilliputians, courage is the operative word.

Many American academics and critics said that they had never heard of her. Yet this should hardly be a smear on her work, for if one is to judge writers, contemporary and from the past, by the reading preferences of academics today, then we would most likely be awarding the Noble Prize in Literature every year to radical hacks. Writing and living literature are hardly commensurate with being a self-conscious, tweed and elbow patches critic.

You see, Müeller’s story finds itself outside the crosshair of fashionable theory. Her books have to do with her experiences with communist dictatorships in Romania and Germany. This regrettable reality hardly lends itself to sporting theoretical opinion. Her books, Nadirs, and The Land of Green Plums explore the nature of state-run censorship. Mueller said: “I wish I could utter a sentence for all those whom dictatorships deprive of dignity every day, up to and including the present.”

In another captivating interview, Müeller juxtaposed the horrible reality that she was going through at the moment with the limitations of writing about human experience. After Ceausescu’s security forces threatened her with death, she said: “What was happening could no longer be expressed in speech. I was reacting to the fear of death with a thirst for life.”

It goes without saying that words are not always privy to the contingencies of felt, lived life. Yet I must point out a word of caution to those who in the last thirty years have gotten in the habit of deprecating language by saying that words have no meaning. To these fashionably disingenuous critics, Mueller has something constructive to say: “Nothing but the whirl of words could capture my condition.” Spirit still does rule the world.

Congratulations! Herta Müeller.

Pedro Calderon de la Barca: La Vida es Sueño

2009-12-08T13:35:00.003-05:00

People who have lived in totalitarian countries know the value of remaining aloof of the official, doublespeak, Party-line language. This “logical,” self-consciously suspicious, Freudian, and deceptively analytic language is philosophically juxtaposed with a vitally felt desire for truth by those who remain spontaneous in their outlook on human existence.

Spontaneity is the bedbug - what a cross is to the devil - of radical ideologues and the social engineers who prescribe their social/political agenda.

Consider Pedro Calderon de la Barca’s 1635 play, La Vida es Sueño (Life is a Dream), where he writes in reference to the “internal stream of life” that is felt as vitally conscious life:

For the world
we live in is so curious
that to live is but to dream.
And all that’s happened to me tells me
that while he lives man dreams
what he is until he wakens.

I dream that I am here
manacled in this cell,
and I dreamed I saw myself
before, much better off.
What is life? A frenzy.
What is life? An illusion,
fiction, passing shadow,
and the greatest good the merest dot,
for all of life’s a dream, and dreams
themselves are only part of dreaming

Phenomenology

2009-12-04T15:23:00.002-05:00

The word phenomenology was first used by Johan Heinrich Lambert (1728-1777), a contemporary of Immanuel Kant, when he wrote that the aforementioned would be "the theory of illusion." Kant, in separating the notion of appearance (phenomena) from the 'things-in-themselves' (noumena) concludes that the mind can only know appearances, or what amounts to the surface structure of reality.

Consider what is meant when Hamlet in Act I, Scene V tells Horatio: "There are more things in heaven and Earth Horatio than are dreamt of in your philosophy?" Hamlet's implication is clear: perhaps human existence is essentially composed of ineffable essences.

Emile Zola's "The Death of Olivier Becaille"

2009-12-01T15:27:00.002-05:00

Great writers have dealt with the subject of death and immortality in very interesting ways. Consider Emile Zola’s short story, “The Death of Olivier Becaille.” In that story the main character dies, becomes a spectator at his own funeral, and is eventually too cognizant of his own burial, as he suffers through a living entombment.

About this hellish circumstance, he utters, “Eternity is not of longer duration than one second spent in nihility.” When the main character manages to return from his “death,” he is saddened to witness that his wife is about to remarry. He walks the streets pensively deciding whether to return home, but finally opts not to. His reasoning is that he does not wish to disturb the happiness that his widow has found. At this point, he no longer fears death but rather only loneliness. He states, “Death no longer frightens me, but it does not seem to care for me now that I have no motive in living; and I have been forgotten upon earth.”

On Visiting Edgar Allan Poe's Grave

2009-11-29T19:07:00.004-05:00

I was thirteen years old when I first read Poe. It was “The Tell-Tale Heart” that served as my introduction to his work. What attracts such young readers to Poe’s dark romanticism? Action, adventure, the thrill of the unknown, these are some viable candidates.

Horror stories should only attract people who understand them as being merely a genre of literature, or a convention of stories that thrive on make-belief. With the notable exception of psychopaths, no sophisticated reader takes delight in the extra literary goings-on in Poe’s stories. It is true that death is a central aspect of life that is often best understood in works of fiction. Yet the finality that is death to human existence is never as playful as writers would have us believe. This is equivalent to what logicians call the “material condition” of premises in a syllogism. In other words, what matters most is the form.

Poe’s stories have always held a special place in my reading habits. For this reason, I was delighted this past summer when I found myself before Poe’s grave in Baltimore. To visit Poe’s grave was one of my priorities, when the family visited that mid-Atlantic city. My children were already acquainted with Poe. Thus, our visit served as an opportunity to talk about American literature and history.

There is something significant in visiting the grave of historical figures. I suppose that such visits bring us closer to the memory of the deceased. This fosters a greater connection between us and historical figures in ways that books cannot afford. Somehow our visit to a grave humanizes our conception of historical figures. In Poe’s case, this was a personal quest of mine to pay respect to a writer who I have read since childhood. Visiting his grave somehow made his existence in the life of this reader more focused in space and time. I got the same feeling when I visited the Pantheon in Paris, and saw the graves of Voltaire, Rousseau, Hugo and Zola. I was equally moved when I stood before the graves of the Popes who are buried in the crypt under Saint Peter’s.

The small cemetery that makes up the grounds of Westminster Church, where Poe is buried contains graves that are over two hundred years old. Sitting there on a warm summer morning, I imagined Poe walking from his house, about one mile away, to the harbor. He must have taken great pleasure in walking the dark streets of Baltimore, in addition to Philadelphia, Richmond and New York, some of the places where he lived, while concocting the stuff that was to inform his hair-raising stories.

Poe writes in “Time and Space” that “we appreciate time by events alone.” For a writer like Poe, walking through dark city streets late at night is merely a necessary part of his trade. I look about me in the gentle light of morning and try to imagine a raven glancing into Poe’s soul, in this, the tranquil metropolis of nevermore: “Deep into that darkness peering, long I stood there wondering, fearing…”

Flying

2009-11-25T19:19:00.016-05:00

The pilot slowly brings the airplane to the beginning of the runway. I look around the cabin and notice many passengers asleep. They have been sleeping since shortly after they entered the aircraft.

I brace myself for an exciting takeoff. I look out of my window at the other airplanes sitting outside a hanger. I spot a DC-6. I think of how vast a commercial airport runway truly is. This brings to mind the first time I stared out into that colossal area of asphalt before me. I was fifteen years old and riddled with nervous excitement during my first flight. The airplane was a Cessna 150. I was as dazzled then as I continue to be today by the flying machines that man has built.

The Embraer CRJ 700 is a delightful machine. The airplane speeds through the runway, quickly gaining takeoff speed. Forty seconds later and we are airborne. As I gaze down at my hometown, I still get the same impression that I got from my first experiences in flying: I am not really going up, but rather, the world is falling away. I identify my home, my children’s school nearby. I am moved by the fact that all of my hopes and aspiration rest there, below me, in what is essentially a much smaller world than it appears from the ground.

The Embraer CRJ 700 banks to the left and continues to claim on its way north. The early morning sun comes in through the right side windows and floods the cabin with vibrant light. This quiet and smooth aircraft is a darling of the sky for its class. In many ways it gives one a taste of flying a private jet. The pilot comes on and informs us that we will be climbing to 35, 000 feet. This is close to the maximum ceiling capacity of this marvelous airliner.

After my first flight on a Cessna 150, I flew the 152 and 172. From the age of five or six I was captivated by the idea of being a pilot. I loved to see those beautiful and powerful machines that took to the sky. As a child, there was never an airplane that flew past me that I did not gaze at. I was moved by the sounds of the different engines. The roar of jet engines like the Boeing 727, DC-8, the Convair 880, and my favorite, the Boeing 707, made me cheer on those pilots and their fabulous airplanes, as they flew overhead.

The sweet sound of propeller engines still finds a special place in my heart and imagination, wherever I encounter one. Never did a DC-3 fly by that I did not drop what I was doing to admire its grace and beauty. That formidable machine, built in 1935, is still flying. Whenever I see one today, I cannot help but regret the fact that I have yet to fly in one. Her slow and graceful manners speak of a time when the world still thought, as Mies van der Rohe has written, “that God is in the details.”

Because for many years my family lived in the direct path of airplanes taking off and landing in Miami International, I was fortunate to see many legendary airplanes at close range. I even got to see the Concorde when this supersonic bird first began flying to Miami. I loved the symmetry of the 707, as it flew right above me. The majesty of the Boeing 747 is still a sight to ponder. I could even identify airplanes by their distinctive contrails.

I studied aviation history in abundant detail. Yet I was never satisfied with pictures in books, I had to experience them firsthand. I watched their landing gear coming in and out of their bellies. I paid attention to the shapes and colors of the logos of the airlines, as some of these came and went. Pan American and Eastern were always some of my favorites. I loved the National Airlines logo of “Linda” at the front of the DC-10s. National’s television commercials dazzled me: “Fly me, I’m Linda.” What fun and imagination commercial aviation once inspired. I am grateful for having experienced the excitement of having lovely machines like the Lockheed Constellation lighting up my life. As soon as I saw some interesting aspect of the airplanes overhead, I would go to the library and look it up. I spent many quiet, solitary hours in such bliss sitting on the lawn gazing up at the sky.

I now see Indianapolis below me. This is a nice town. I like the people and their values. I am happy to be coming here for a conference on man and the western world. The Embraer CRJ 700 flies low over some colorful fields. It is a clear and beautiful day. The runway beckons the pilots, like candy in a five and dime tantalizes little children. Aviation history, I tell myself, as I look down, is perhaps the definitive creation of our tired and unimaginative world today. We touch down gently. I think of the Wright Brothers. Prometheus unbound, let us say. I am grateful for the dreams of the people who have brought us to soar the heavens, as ancient man once hoped for. I look around the inside of the airplane and I am not surprised to see many passengers still sleeping.

The Ford Century

2009-11-19T11:08:00.005-05:00

The other day as I was looking through my automotive library I came across a fantastic book that details the Ford Motor Company and the truly memorable automobiles that it has created. As a collector car enthusiast, I cannot help but become moved by the beautiful lines and proportions of automobiles prior to the 1980s. In a time when automobiles are made to look like vulgar-looking appliances, when the buying public has been duped by government bureaucrats and their parasitical, environmental “activists” into paying exorbitant amounts of money for tuna cans that have no redeeming value, it is easy to see why beauty no longer matters. The current state of automobile creation – notice, I cannot say design – is in a dismal state of uncreative shame. No doubt, ours is a world ruled by the liberating power of ugliness. At least we can still enjoy a vast photographic history of beauty, as this informed the very functional devices that have enlightened our lives.

Today more than ever before Kingsley Amis seems vindicated in his belief that there once was a time when people reviewed books that they actually liked. His implication is merely that we shouldn’t be miserable in our reading - and when reviewing, we must make serious strides to respect the artistic and moral autonomy of writers.

Russ Banham’s The Ford Century: Ford Motor Company and the Innovations that Shaped the World is a masterpiece of automotive writing. Besides being technically competent, the author is never derisive of American products or industry. The first striking quality of this book is its stunningly beautiful photography. The fourteen introductory pages that lead up to the first chapter take the reader on a brief pictorial retrospective of Ford Motor Company history that culminates with a dazzling two-page panoramic picture of a maroon 1962 Lincoln Continental as it leaves a Lincoln/Mercury dealer. The book’s presentation and layout demonstrate considerable respect for historical detail and biographical nuance. The six chapters that comprise the book pay close attention to Henry Ford - the visionary and how the company that he founded came to reflect his artistic and industrial vision.

The initial chapter traces the history of the Ford family and Henry’s dislike for the toil of farm work. The Ford legacy begins, Banham writes, “with a boy who loved to take watches apart and put them back together again.” This early sign of ingenuity is a significant historical anecdote because as the author points out, in 1863, the year that Henry was born only one in five Americans lived in cities. America at that time was predominantly rural. The difficulties inherent in the vast distances that separated people served as inspiration for Henry’s inventiveness. Even though the book is a celebration of Ford products, technology, and innovation the work can also be categorized as a biographical study of Henry Ford, his aspirations, character, leadership and his strong will. Some readers might even be reminded of Howard Roark’s Promethean creative desire in Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead. Others will perhaps reflect on the strife of the Wright Brothers as inventors and the flying machines that they created.

The Ford Century also helps in enlightening readers to an exciting period in American history that was filled with flexibility, promise, ingenuity, and artistic integrity. We should not forget that this is a history book. Readers are also treated to a historical overview of Ford’s conception and development of the assembly line and his introduction of five-dollar a day wages. Banham is mindful of Ford’s place in the world’s automotive industry in a chapter titled, “Innovation and Ingenuity.” The work captures the essence of a time in American history that witnessed the quixotic leadership of such automotive figures like Henry Ford, Henry Leyland, Edsel Ford, Walter Chrysler, and E.T. Gregorie. Such figures are representative of Harry S. Truman’s truism that men make history, not the contrary, and that during periods with no leadership, progress of any kind stands still.

Ford’s engineering marble: the development of the V-8 engine in 1932 was possible due to the development of new casting technology that allowed the company to create a one-piece engine block. The importance of this industrial feat is effectively captured by two lively letters that Mr. Ford received praising the speed and power that the new engine generated. What is particularly interesting about these letters is that their respective author’s took time out from their tense lifestyles to show their allegiance to Ford automobiles. One of the letters is by the notorious bank robber John Dillinger. Dillinger writes: “Hello Old Pal. You have a wonderful Car. It’s a treat to drive one. Your slogan should be b Drive a Ford and Watch the Other Cars Fall Behind You. I can make any other car take Ford’s dust. Bye-bye.” Here Dillinger is alluding to Ford’s slogan, “Watching the Fords Go By.” And in another spirited letter Clyde Champion Barrow, better known as one half of the infamous criminal duo “Bonnie and Clyde” writes from Tulsa, Oklahoma in 1934: “Dear Sir. While I still have got breath in my lungs, I will tell you what a dandy car you make. I have drove Fords exclusively when I could get away with one. For sustained speed and freedom from trouble the Ford has got every other car skinned, and even if my business hasen’t been strickly legal it don’t hurt anything to tell you what a fine car you got in the V8. Yours truly, Clyde Champion Barrow.” Of course, the over-indulgent use of the imagination in punctuation and spelling is solely theirs.

Following this moment of levity the book shifts its attention to the strong artistic relationship that was forged between Edsel Ford, known simply as Mr. Edsel to Ford employees and E.T. “Bob” Gregorie, the dapper automobile stylist who served as Ford Motor Company’s first design chief. The importance of this artistic partnership is perhaps best weighed in the sheer beautiful designs that the two produced. Some of the most notable examples of this aesthetic collaboration include the: 1936 Lincoln Zephyr, 1938 Zephyr, 1941 Ford, and the majestic 1939 Continental, which has become Gregorie’s trademark and the only American luxury automobile to be showcased for design excellence at The Museum of Modern Art. But also because according to Gregorie in an interview prior to his death on December 3, 2002 at 94 years of age, Edsel Ford was the only president of an automobile company who has been so concerned with design. Edsel hired Gregorie in 1931 when the young designer was only 22 years old. He worked at Ford until 1943, right after Edsel’s death. This remarkable relationship is expertly documented by Henry Dominguez in his book, Edsel Ford and E.T. Gregorie: The Remarkable Design Team and Their Classic Fords of the 1930s and 1940s.

In a particularly colorful chapter titled, “Heart and Soul: Twenty-Five vehicles that generated Excitement and Inspired Passion” the author details some of Ford’s milestone cars such as: The Model-T in 1908; 1928 Model-A; 1939 Mercury Eight; 1941 Lincoln Continental; the introduction of the F-series pickup in 1948; Ford’s first “modern” slab-sided car in 1949; 1955 Thunderbird, and the 1956 Continental Mark II, which had a separate Ford division exclusively devoted to its development and execution. The chapter continues with the1961 Lincoln Continental, an automobile that won the Industrial Designers Institute’s award “for its overall appearance and execution” and Car Life Magazine’s Engineering Excellence Award; the 1964 Mustang, a compact and versatile vehicle that enjoyed sales in excess of 500,000 by the end of its first year of production; 1986 Taurus, which issued the first aerodynamic body, and the 1991 Ford Explorer. The book concludes with more biographical emphasis on Henry Ford as “Citizen of the World.”

The Ford Century is a detailed and engaging retrospective of the major triumphs, innovations and tribulations of the Ford Motor Company. However, it would be a mistake to view this work as being solely an automotive book. Instead, special attention is paid to the people, their lives and vision responsible for such memorable products as the 1969 Lincoln Continental Mark III and the Ford Tri-Motor airplane. Of particular interest to this reader is the interest that the author takes in uncovering the psyche and ethos of such visionaries. Shunning traditional notions of biography, the author instead opts for what the Spanish philosopher Jose Ortega y Gasset (1883-1955) referred to as “narrative” or what amounts to a lyrical “life as drama” approach to history that attempts to view history not as mammoth and objective blocks of time, but rather as inwardly lived personal stories. The main contention of viewing history as narrative is to emphasize the biographical component in any historical analysis. Mr. Banham gives the reader a clear and incisive glance at the people behind the events and products that have been passed down as “objective history.” He achieves this by allowing the characters involved to speak for themselves without interceding in the historical drama that he is describing. The author does not fall into the temptation of “reading” currently fashionable political agendas into the text. In a time when revisionist history is used in accordance with the temporary program of any given interest group, The Ford Century comes across as the trajectory of one man’s vision. The book will be of great interest to historians, automobile enthusiasts, and to students of history.

Lincoln Automobile Design Values, Part I.

2009-11-10T13:51:00.006-05:00

As a university professor, I always try to integrate my love for Lincoln automobiles whenever I discuss questions of the nature of aesthetics. Automobile makers today present young people with the dubious notion that the technology and design of today's cars are the sole creation of the current bash of automobile engineers.

My students cannot believe that my two Lincoln daily drivers are eighteen and thirteen years old respectively. They are under the impression that only a new car is worth having. What they are in fact sold on is utility, image, and contempt for anything of lasting value. There is too much talk today in all quarters of life about "style." Of course, this ignores that style and class are very different things.

Unfortunately, this is a very disconcerting reality given that these questions run deeper than just questions of design quality, aesthetics, and sound design integrity. When some people ask if cars that are eighteen years old run, this vacuous attitude can only be interpreted to mean two things: glaring ignorance or shameless arrogance.

People who do not possess historical knowledge, or who neither care for it are the ones that always blindly defend the status quo. To care for things from a past era is also to have respect for the materials used, the building process and principles employed, and the values of a given place and time.

To Embrace Folly

2009-10-23T15:27:00.011-04:00

Seeing the effect of his writings,
Erasmus rightly judged that his
power lay in his pen, not in titles
or partisan activism.

- Jacques Barzun

Writers and thinkers like Erasmus of Rotterdam do not come along often. In our own arid and banal age such writers have been relegated to the dustbin of history, for what use can we have for the eternal wisdom they transmit?

Perhaps no other observation fits our envious and resentful time better than his quip: “In the land of the blind the one-eyed man is king.” The Praise of Folly may have been written in 1509, and with the exception of the ancient stoics, Schopenhauer’s The Wisdom of Life, Baltasar Gracian's The Art of Worldly Wisdom and La Rochefoucauld’s Maxims, no other work of the last three hundred years even comes close in making sense of the human condition.

Nothing smells worse to our enlightened contemporaries than wisdom or any talk of it.

Regardless, observation on human folly is a vital pastime reserved only for the wisest and most patient. It is also an activity that given its nature as a reflective exercise can only be entertained by people of good will.

Consider that only people of good will try to make amends of their own mistakes. Only people of good will remain humble enough to know when life has defeated them. Good will allows its practitioners to understand life as resistance, and thus to battle life on her own terms, not ours. People of good will do not shower themselves with excuses and blame others for their own misgivings and personal inadequacies. People who practice good will do not politicize their lot in life.

Jacques Barzun, who along with Paul Johnson, Paul Hollander, and a handful of others, is one of the last of the great men of letters in the English language, and an undisputed master of the history of ideas, writes about Erasmus in From Dawn to Decadence: “In his satirical skits depicting the life around him, he saw the interplay of wills free enough to choose good or bad, wise or foolish actions.”

Barzun goes on to write: “Folly, speaking for herself, shows how people of every rank and occupation prefer her to common sense, yet they give her a bad name, especially the worst fools.”

What is it about the cancer survivor who remains - after their life-saving surgery - as much of a cut-throat as before? What has this person learned about life and death? I suppose that we have still to discover an operation that successfully removes our cancer of the spirit.

How many of us have been brutalized by the very same person who we saved from a serious fall, professionally or otherwise? No doubt, most human beings breathe and eat folly. For, what do we make of the frigid selfishness of those who have been born with a silver spoon, and who are the first to demand “justice” for the downtrodden?

I have found this to be one of those irreconcilable contradictions that inform the human condition. I have also learned to laugh at it. I suppose one answer to this question is that folly’s sibling, hypocrisy, refuses to be outdone.

Experience alone teaches us nothing.

I have always lived by the dictum that even a modicum of success in life should be enough to keep us rooted in the essence of our own being. Another way of saying this is that success should make us humble.

Philosophy as Vision and Eclectic Vital Creation

2009-10-13T14:57:00.001-04:00

When people first hear the words “philosophy,” “philosophize” and “philosopher” their immediate impression is that of an abstract or defused discipline that is often also technical in makeup. Undoubtedly, these words often intimidate many causal observers. Even younger students of philosophy cringe at the thought of hair-splitting and debates that, in many cases, come across as isolated, self-referential, or theoretical analysis that lack all semblance of vitality.

This is unfortunate, for Philosophy, unlike other less systematic disciplines, demands a level of active engagement by thinkers that transcends the practice of logic and pure reason. This is a condition that eludes the merely curious minded.

The practice of philosophy is also symptomatic of a complicated marriage between one who reflects and the object of reflection. Most disciplines make a parcel of reality their sole concern. Philosophers, on the other hand, cannot enjoy this privilege. Philosophical questions are dialectical in nature. This means that our concerns, even when successfully quenched, only manage to launch the thinker into further questions. Recoiling back onto itself or spiraling out to engage the next anti-thesis, the trajectory of philosophical questioning oscillates forward and backwards, in what Kant has referred to as an infinite synthesis. This vacillation, as it might appear to be the case for all but the initiated, is also a profound source of frustration for many.

Philosophy also requires a degree of self-engagement that in many instances frightens many who are not prepared for this exercise in autonomy. In many instances, it is the demands of reflection itself that alienates some people from philosophy, and nothing more.

Conscientious philosophers are brought to wonder whether this unfortunate condition is actually necessary at all, and, if in fact, damage is done to philosophy by these hollow accusations. This misleading impression comes about partly because philosophy as an autonomous, systematic discipline makes it its duty to analyze the many components of reality in order to make sense of the whole.

In some respects, the act of breaking down the respective components of any system is necessary in order to achieve a true understanding of the entire system. Beginning with concerns that in some instances are necessitated by particular questions, thinkers are often forced to broaden their scope in order to tie together their findings to a more unifying principle. This is an example of how attention to specific detail will alienate some people from philosophical reflection.

Yet philosophy does not need to be as “analytical” as is often believed, or is actually practiced by many. Unfortunately, in many cases this is the only concept of philosophy that some people formulate. It seems that philosophy is doomed to confusion by either coming across as too rigid in its attention to detail, or to “abstract” in embracing broader questions. First impressions may be said to be misleading, but they are also often very damaging.

When the aforementioned is the first impression that people encounter of philosophy, they fail to understand the noble origin of the discipline. This is truly no other than the great task laid out for philosophy as philosophia, or what is essentially an intrinsic love of wisdom. Some of the major examples of this early embodiment of the spirit of philosophy are imprinted in the thought of Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle. But this is also the raison d’être of stoicism, for instance, as this is a noble attempt for man to live in the world.

We ought not to be surprised that the love of wisdom seems like a hard pill to swallow in a technological age that is consumed with expediency. As the ultimate and unifying form of knowledge, wisdom has evaded the majority of humanity from time immemorial.

Practical knowledge is what most people have sought throughout history. The demands of the daily world force us to be efficient in our decision-making and quick on our heels, some have argued. We mobilize our vital energy in concerns that are leveled at us from forces that, in some instances, we can neither foresee, or that we solicit. This seems like a sensible belief.

Wisdom has everything to do with the way that we organize our lives, how we comport ourselves vis-à-vis human reality. If wisdom is achieved at the end of the line, as it were, this serves as a bonus that vindicates the vital energy and vision required to live what is still today – dare I say – considered the virtues of a good life.

Wisdom and the fruits that it offers those who embrace it can arrive quickly - hopefully at an early age. This will allow for the setting of the course for our future life. Wisdom serves as a buffer zone between the actual conditions that we must live out and our understanding, and our maneuvering through this reality. In the absence of wisdom human existence becomes a reactive, dragged-out, mere biological existence that often fails to find any redeeming quality in itself.

Analysis is the rational act that deciphers the atomic aspects of human reality. The word itself really means to take apart, whereas its counterpart, synthesis, means to put back together. The latter is without a doubt a much more complicated and constructive task, and as such more akin, and complimentary to philosophy proper. But analysis is crucial in our ability to recognize the starting point of any act of reflection. Analysis, however, ought not to signify “analytical,” or “over-intellectualization.”

The two aforementioned words are often confused with the genuine nature of philosophy. They actually serve as a corruption of the spirit of the discipline. While analysis comes about as a vitally spontaneous response to a pressing question or concern, the analytical posture, is instead an act of picking and choosing its intended object. And while analysis confronts the object of reflection out of a central need that must be addressed and a resolution sought, the merely analytical is a coached or pre-meditated, self-conscious attempt at answer-seeking. The former informs the center of the philosophical vocation, while the latter is only a pedantic effrontery.

On the other hand, we can explain synthesis as being a unifying process that re-creates a more ample degree of its original line of speculation. Analysis leads to synthesis, whether complete in its sweeping and unifying clarity, or culminating in a partial understanding.

The analytical posture ends in the very arbitrary manner in which it begins. The essence of synthesis is that at the end of the day, this process delivers the thinker to a greater understanding and more sophisticated perspective of reality. By sophistication I am referring to a profounder engagement with our vital, human condition. This is what is meant by enlightenment.

However, because some people are more attuned to reality than others, this does not mean that reality is more accommodating or kinder. A heightened awareness of reality is no more complimentary to our personal wishes, however, than to those who practice the notion that “ignorance is bliss.” Again, it is often the case that analysis, as a rational yet practical process tends to intimidate a great many number of people.

In addition, the task of thought as a practical tool of man’s is always an attempt to make sense of the “why” of things. This activity grows, if for no other reason, than out of a vital need for contentment. Happiness may be heavy-handed at times, but contentment as an existential condition is rarely noticed because it does not call attention to itself. We can base this on the fact that the ancient Greeks thought of human reality as being composed of what the Greek word phainomenon designates as “appearance.” In other words, not “this” or “that” particular appearance, but rather appearance as the entry-level understanding that reality is always much more ambiguous than its immediate appearance dictates.

That is, human reality has a truth component that man can effectively attain. However, this discovery does not occur as something vague or automatic. The ambiguity that reality presents us with can be known because man has the fundamental capacity to know it. This one-to-one correlation between human consciousness and our ability to know it is very often ignored or taken for granted. Man “knows what he knows,” or to put this differently, man knows what he is capable of knowing. This is a common sense proposition.

At a deeper level, knowledge also becomes a fundamental component of the philosophical vocation. Thus, phainomenon is encountered not as a final statement of reality, at first, but as the basement of a deeper reality.

In addition, at an existential level – and this is what truly informs the genuine and sincere philosophical vocation - we also have a pressing need to know. Again, this existential necessity does not have to present itself as anything greater than a practical matter. Today we can refer to the aforementioned phenomenon as the anthropic principle, for instance. That is, we are the kind of entity that is capable of answering the questions that it poses for itself. The truth remains that man assumes this epistemological capability as a given condition of his nature. This is a quality of the human entity that is very easily taken for granted.

This correlation between cosmic reality and human understanding came to be called Aletheia, or truth, by the ancient Greeks. For the man on the street, the names and labels do not matter. The recognition of truth as this presents itself in the pressing conditions of the daily world is indeed what is exercised as a vital concern of man’s. This, besides the discovery of form is the greatest and most ingenious discovery of the ancient Greeks. The important thing in this process is to keep in mind that reality does make us work for our understanding.

This is what Parmenides means when he writes that “reality does not give away its secrets.” His notion of truth as revealing-unrevealing is no other than the realization of human consciousness as both, bearer of truth, and the mechanism that comes to understand the human condition as resistance. This applies equally to science as it does to self-knowledge. This also means that in order to achieve understanding we must already potentially have first developed a vital desire for knowledge.

Philosophy, then, is first and foremost a way of life. But this early philosophical activity is one that most people give up on during their adolescence.

Walking in Manhattan

2009-10-09T17:50:00.002-04:00

I sit and watch people passing by.

Few notice me or the marvelous building behind me. In fact, they observe few things in their path. I imagine they have a singular intent in mind, to arrive at their desired destination.

People move in the city in very different ways than they do in a rural setting. While weather, a severe storm, or the sun beating down on a farmer’s brow in the country becomes something to ponder - or to work around - the city shields us from such things. The illusion of protection in great numbers and our ability to hide in a vast conglomeration of buildings is an interesting aspect of human psychology.

Yet the metropolis does much more than remove us from our natural solitary condition. Commerce, in the scale found in modern cities, is a natural reaction to our existentially solitary state. Notice, I didn’t say that man is not a social being. I am merely thinking about man’s unquestionably solitary existential differentiation.

We trade and barter, buy and sell from instinct, and based on our ability to do so. Try as we like to intellectualize these characteristics of man; we always fail for the simple reason that those who have a penchant for over-intellectualizing the human condition always also transform the latter into a caricature of itself.

I continue my walk around this twentieth-century structure, as if a vacationer from my human perspective. What would beings from another world think of us and our creations? The thought is one frequented by youngsters, beings who know nothing more than to reflect using the tools of a naïve, broader perspective. As children, we are interested enough in the universe around us to tackle such questions.

The beauty of the city has re-kindled this awe and wonder in me.

At this moment, it is the majesty of a building, its proportions, its place in human development, in our evolution as seekers of form that has sent my emotions soaring. During other times, it is has been the birth of a child, the simple pleasure I take in the completion of a difficult task, or the mere enjoyment of simplicity.

"This is the city," I tell myself, as I look around and nod in approval.

However, what I witness and see are two different things.

To witness something we only have to be immersed in it, a fireworks displays, a bird busy building a nest, a child learning to hit a baseball. We witness the world sensually.

Camus was right; to witness or experience something is merely to live on the surface of the world, to take the apple for its skin. All animals do this. As essential as this is for our well being and survival, to witness the world is only a portion of the human experience.

Seeing, then, is what makes us human. We can imagine the origin of fireworks and gun powder in the hands of the Chinese. We marvel at the instinct and dedication to detail of the bird building its temporary home. Did it calculate how much time it has at its disposal before laying its eggs?

We take a mystical pleasure in the passage of time, as the child that was merely a helpless babe in arms not too long ago, and now has developed the quickness and eye-hand coordination to pick up the trajectory of a baseball and hit it. This is to see.

Seeing often freezes us in our tracks by not allowing us to take anything for granted.
The lines of a building or the unique body sculpting of automobiles from long ago, these qualities jump at us only when we are receptive to them.

We only see when we have the need to do so!

What this all means to us is hardly the stuff that science can answer based solely on the mastery of technique. For the ancient Egyptians the belief in immortality moved them to create technical proficiency – science.

We ought to remember the order of things. Seeing is an essential part of nobility. It safeguards our freshness of spirit and humility. It is often said that “we see what we want to see.” This is no doubt true. But it is also correct to assert that there is a set limited capacity to our seeing that cannot be denied.

The relevant and pressing question for us today is how best to maximize this in positions of cultural, spiritual, intellectual, and social political prominence.

A culture that is blind to the aforementioned hierarchy of essences naturally always settles for the greatest common denominator, or what amounts to the appeasing of those who cannot see, but who demand the perspective of those who can. This is the most pressing concern for us in the twenty-first century.

Pedro Baron

2009-10-03T10:38:00.002-04:00

Finding himself inspired by the errant Don Quixote, the obscure Basque writer, Pedro Baron, (1775-1845) fashioned his best known work, Hombres Sin Destino (Men without Destiny), after Cervantes’ warm blooded hero.

Baron was fond of walking. He spent endless hours exploring the mountainous terrain of his home in Forua. In addition, Baron had a keen interest in exploring the many caves in that region.

Most importantly, he tells us, in his recondite biography, Las Ocurrencias de Una Vida (The Occurrences of My Life) that what he truly enjoyed was taking his sheep to pasture. Even though he only owned a dozen of these gentle animals at any given time, Baron credited his time walking alongside his animals as some of the best days of his life. He loved to sit by the banks of the Gernika River and take in the splendor of the countryside.

On many occasions, Baron would sit by the Roman ruins of Forua and imagine himself in Roman times. He visualized the buildings with their occupants coming and going. Pliny the Elder makes mention of Forua, a word that takes its origin from the Latin word for “forum.”

Baron explains that the ancient ruins tell him that time levels all things: “Man’s most cherished follies are all condemned to the animal instincts in us, while the objective truths that we uncover become the reservoir of wisdom for future generations, if they so wish to benefit from this.”

Writing in Hombres Sin Destino, Baron lets the reader in on his conviction that he owes his existence to a long line of thinkers that extend back to ancient times. He does not say if this should be taken in a literal or figurative sense. How else, he explains: “Can a man know his direction in life so clearly from such an early age as I have?” He also writes about his life: “I live the sweetness of feeling life flowing through me. What greater power can a man hope for?” Granted, Baron was a genius. As geniuses go, few people can make sense of such directed vision and convictions.

In Una Vision Singular (A Singular Vision) Baron stresses the importance of being earnest with oneself. He traces his search for self-knowledge to inquietude that, from childhood, he knew he was an entity unlike any other child of his acquaintance. He explains how he came to feel and live-out the vitality that possessed him. He credits Schopenhauer with enlightening him in the ways of a free soul who wanders the earth guided by a driving essence.

Baron argues that the solitude that he enjoyed, walking in the fields, communing with his beloved sheep, the time spent meditating on the nature of the soul, all of this kept him from falling into the trap of the common-place. He called the pettiness of most people’s lives “the scourge of little men.”

How we can make sense of such wisdom today, I am hesitant to say.

However, Baron predicted a day when men would be “gutted,” “hollowed out,” “their entrails, their souls paraded around like mindless, spiritless cattle on the way to the slaughter house.”

He goes on to say: “The day will dawn upon us when all that will be left of man will be an empty carapace. Having forsaken any sensibility toward the sublime, toward God, having dismantled all the roads that lead to the wisdom of self-knowledge, man will only be a social-political animal who will place himself at the service of those who do the devil’s work. That age of total dissolution of profoundness, sincerity, and respect for the sacredness of the individual is quickly dawning on us.”

Undoubtedly, Baron is not a thinker that most of our intellectual gurus will care to understand today. His enlightening and timeless wisdom is currently unfashionable.

Endymion's Staid Melancholy

2009-10-01T09:58:00.003-04:00

1

Floating. Endymion imagines himself floating.

Glancing at vagabond clouds, their momentary shade dancing through sun-drenched fields - Endymion gathers his strength.

“Where do shadows begin?” he asks, his head turned toward the infinite blueness of the sky.

“Shadows are mere fragments of reality. Are they not? Always trembling with fear at the thought of extinction. Shadows are to clouds what man is to time – a dissolvable fraction, a ghost, a mere collage of flesh,” he questions, but cannot be sure.

“Hope is the call of our being.”

Endymion reminds himself that time and human flesh are portions of a greater, ethereal order.

“This atomic unity that we witness as human existence is the essence of our being. Clear as Nordic ice to those who can see, our drifting, like airy clouds indicates an infinite inquietude – a hunger and longing for an end not nullified by time – but this, too, is an unattainable hope,” Endymion’s mind wanders.

“We… Always trembling at the mere thought of extinction - a nonexistence that we can always foresee. This is the trouble, you see! Like the fate of wispy clouds, we anticipate our dissolution,” he consoles himself.

2

As clouds multiply, Endymion continues to gather his strength.

The storm approaches.

He waits…and…waits - and continues waiting until his staid, vital resemblance to iron begins to melt into the asphyxiating soil.

“From soil to fossil is but a twitch of an eyelid in eternity,” he tries to convince himself.

“And we? We are always caught in the middle. Serving as the self-conscious reservoir of the absolute, we are a semblance of time, a piece of our past, a future unrealized, and a forgotten memory - a trembling hand.”

Noticeably winded, he goes on: “Floating. Drifting. Always proactive, a beating heart wonders...What is the cost of wisdom to a trembling hand? What unforeseeable scale will weigh the fibrous tissue of my heart - of my virtue - when I have joined the soil?”

3

“Ah, Soil! That perennial and sinister witness, that ever-present earth - the beginning of fossilization, of actualization, of memories frozen in time.”

Are we, too, like Endymion, only in another place and time, waiting for Selene’s kiss that grants us eternal life?

And who can know non-being, anyhow?

“Anticipation. An unstoppable crescendo, a resounding heart. Who will be a witness to my having-been? Who will finish my unfinished thoughts, my conversations?”
Endymion waits for Selene.

“Drifting. Always drifting – in and out of certainty, unity - sensation. What a grandiloquent invention, this creation, this accumulation of vital energy, this human life where only calcified emotions remain. Always drifting – we - fragments, entities trapped in time. The fear of a trembling hand is assuaged by another willing, quivering hand – a spirited lover of life. Who will grant me the honor of completing my unfinished sentences?”

Drifting under truant, rogue clouds. Fluttering under the gravity of his inner space, Endymion gathers his vital might - his sweat drenching him in a sun-soaked field: “Inquietude, immobility, ingratitude. This is the nature of human contingency. This is our lifeblood. Always floating. Drifting,” he yawns.

Endymion wanders through green fields, like a wayfaring cloud…

He asks himself: “What is the prize of passion and understanding for one who keeps the score?”

Endymion leisurely awaits Selene's calming, fateful kiss under the passing shadows on Mount Latmos

Trajectories

2009-09-26T09:04:00.002-04:00

A young man grows up in an obscure town, away from the lights of the twentieth century…bitter, resentful, and envious of all unlike himself, for his allotted allowance of “social justice” has evaded him.

This is the common-place excuse and primitive cry of radical ideologues who embrace hate, destruction and war. (THIS IS ALSO THE POINT WHERE THE DISCERNING DIRECTOR OF MAN’S OLDEST AND MOST COVETED SHOW, SHOUTS: “CUT!...CUT!... HAVEN’T WE FILMED THIS SAME TIRED AND WORN-OUT SOAP OPERA ENDLESS TIMES BEFORE? COME ON PEOPLE, LET’S HAVE SOME SELF RESPECT. NOW, GIVE ME A DAMN SCRIPT THAT REFLECTS MY INTEGRITY AND INTELLIGENCE. LET’S TRY FILMING OUR STORY AGAIN, ONLY THIS TIME, PLEASE LET’S TRY TO BE SINCERE).

The aforementioned clichéd scenario of our “disenfranchised” anti-hero does not explain the self-conscious zest for destruction that is bred into the well-to-do who spend lots of time and money being dazzled by the venom and poison of some well paid professors in exclusive universities.

Before our anti-hero has a chance to peel through the layers of reality…of truth…he becomes consumed by a criminal ideology that promises that he too can be like God.

The barbarian, mass man, and totalitarian impulse that reside within his every fiber choke and suffocate our self-styled angry young man into rage. But do not become confused or alarmed by this…it is life itself that he hates.

Because the contingencies and demands of life are not to his liking, our anti-hero rants and raves, and eventually turns on the hand that feeds him.

The course of history begins when the envious, calculating, convictionless and spineless will of…how else to say it?…bastards… decides that it too must attain objectification.

Father. Forced labor camps are no place for gentlemen…noble men like you.

Father’s life…and that of many more people like him perennially come into the control of tyrants whose pointless, worthless lives have no rhyme or reason.

Father - a simple working-man - escaped the firing line through sheer blind luck. This, while the calculated, dialectically planned terror of ideological criminals, devils who rule the fate of dignified, decent men, is inspired by radical intellectual ideologues. The name Jean-Paul Sartre quickly comes to mind.

Forced labor camps and Gulags are no place for souls who seek transcendence out of life.

Perfidious dreamer, criminal, murderer of innocence and life alike, how many more generations will you annihilate with your dreams of utopia, where no semblance of autonomous differentiation must be left standing?

Our most important task today is to protect and spare our children from false historians.

Immortality in Enrique Anderson-Imbert's "El Fantasma"

2009-09-22T10:02:00.004-04:00

Life is like crystal, the transparent medium
through which we can see
other objects. If we
permit ourselves to be deluded by the strong
desire
that any transparent things implants in
us, to pass heedlessly through it
to
something on the other side, we shall never see the
crystal.

- Ortega y Gasset

Enrique Anderson Imbert’s provocative and engaging short story "El Fantasma" is about death and immortality.

In Imbert’s story the author compels the reflective reader to ask whether the existence of the soul, that is, of a conscious entity that retains its own identity after death, can exist.

The author’s answer to this question is a resounding, yes! But quickly thereafter the reader realizes that Imbert’s main line of questioning has nothing to do with the traditional question, “Is the soul immortal?” but rather, “In what form?”

Imbert develops a line of thinking that is very original. His notion of the immortality of the soul reflects what can be called a middle way between the Catholic position and what I will refer to as a Neo-Platonic rendition of the afterlife.

For Imbert, the self-determination and autonomy that animates human beings continues to exist in a disembodied, pure-soul state. What Imbert’s story suggests, however, is that the body only serves as the outward vehicle that allows for a union, or interaction with others. The soul, on the other hand, acts as the vitality, or what amounts to the subjectivity that a subject recognizes in itself.

Hence the ontological reality that the protagonist encounters after his death is nothing less than surprising. This ontological confusion begins when the protagonist becomes disoriented in finding himself dead. After the initial shock of death and simultaneously finding himself disembodied in an afterlife, the protagonist’s efforts are all geared towards communication with the living.

However, after the possibility of communicating with the living is exhausted, he then begins a campaign of trying to communicate with the dead. Once that this also fails, he has no choice but to concentrate on what or who he is, now that he is disembodied.

The questions that this story suggests in terms of subjectivity and human autonomy are not only philosophically daring, but also illuminating.

Imbert seems to suggest that spirit, or geist that animates human life is often neglected through the material manifestation of human life. He paints a picture whereby the true nature of subjectivity cannot help but confront itself once that the many distractions of the flesh have been assuaged.

The protagonist in this work, who incidentally remains nameless throughout the story, realizes that he has died only after seeing his own body fall over a chair and unto the floor. After his limp body, which he now stares at and the chair that he tries holding on to have fallen in the middle of the room, he utters, “so, this is death?”

“El Fantasma” begins with a philosophical anti-climax, as it were.

This story resembles the closed-room detective genre. Imbert invites the reader to cite the appropriate questions to an answer that is ready at hand. Imbert tackles the question of life after death in a paradoxical, but very vital manner.

It seems obvious to the discerning reader that from the perspective of life, death, then, is a non-event given that one cannot be conscious of having lost consciousness. The reason for this is that the same consciousness that is in the process of being annihilated cannot logically remain simultaneously aware of its own destruction. This state of awareness is precisely what death negates. The protagonist can only realize that he is dead from the perspective offered him in the afterlife, but not while in the process of dying, regardless of how little time elapses.

The inherent mystery of this momentary transition, Imbert seems to imply, is where all of our hopes and aspirations originate. Let us refer to this view of the afterlife, then, as the common sense view of immortality. This traditional and common sense perspective is seemingly what most humans hope for.

Enrique Anderson Imbert was born in Argentina, in 1910. His literary exploits include novels, essays, and short stories. A substantial number of his literary works utilize paradoxical, if not altogether metaphysical themes and motifs.

Amongst his early novels we can mention Vigilia (1934) and Fuga (1953). “El Fantasma” originally appeared in El Grimorio. Imbert is also very well known as a literary critic and historian. He is the author of a very insightful history of Spanish-American literature entitled, Historia de la Literatura Hispano America, which has appeared in two volumes.

I suggest that the rendition of the afterlife that Imbert proposes is a genuine example of a solipsistic existence, as best as this radical loneliness can be conceived.

The story, I argue, leaves us with several options when trying to pinpoint its possible metaphysical implications. Furthermore, because this work is a short story and not a longer fictional work, it is not ruled by the novelistic constrains of having to develop the inner workings of many characters. It is, instead, a work that solicits thought and reflection.

The reason for my contention has to do with the theme, mood, motif, and the inherent internal conflicts that make up this tale. These are all by their very nature concerns of the thinker par excellence.

Another promising aspect of this story as a philosophical case-study of immortality is that in the presence of several “real,” that is, differentiated characters, their concerns, hopes and aspirations become a truly unique and also perhaps the appropriate manner to offer an existential treatment of the subject of immortality.

In contradistinction to my present proposal, the often-employed stale, analytic manner of dealing with abstract “agents,” when we really mean people, and “entities” to mean human beings, fails as a vital approach to this question. This overly-cerebral method goes awry in terms of a humanistic approach to subjectivity, especially where literature is concerned.

This analytic method does not take into consideration the holistic nature and inner dynamics of the human person. The limitations of this method are impractical and daunting. Traditional approaches to the question of immortality have been formulated either from a strictly religious viewpoint, or from an overly intellectualized wordplay.

Imbert’s story, on the other hand, is a fine example of how literature can make its greatest contribution to humanism. “El Fantasma” accomplishes this by posing metaphysical and ontological conditions that are not readily grasped by analytical thinkers.

It is my conviction that the role of literature not only remains paramount in terms of an exploration of meaning in human existence, beginning perhaps with wisdom literature, but that this role must increase in the future. I say this being fully aware of the great destructive blow that has been dealt to literature by modish - however insipid – proponents of deconstructionism and other make-work “theories.” Regrettably, the latter has nothing to do with literature, only with radical ideology.

The natural marriage of literature and existential philosophy, for instance, will continue to serve as an essential source of philosophical understanding.

Part of the reason for this is that the high esteem that has traditionally been attributed to ancient sources in matters of wisdom, meaning, and Eudaemonia have eroded as sources of inspiration for contemporary man. Reasons for this displacement are several.

Suffice it to say that while some discerning thinkers and writers have now become cynical and nihilistic regarding meaning, the door has been left open for gurus of all kinds and “denominations” to enlighten the public with empty sophisms that are deemed “self help.”

The role of literature in the future must be a return to offering a unitary, humanistic, and well-articulated conception of the human condition. “El Fantasma” reminds us of the value of storytelling for its own sake. This is a task that, given all current indicators, will unfortunately continue to evade overly specialized thinkers…as well as ideologues.

Baseball is a Child's Game

2009-09-19T10:35:00.004-04:00

I prop up my collapsible chair behind home plate. This spot offers me a good vantage point to watch the game. Immediately, I begin to take in the atmosphere. I always get excited when I watch a baseball game, especially those that involve little league teams.

The players begin to warm up.

The field lines are drawn. The ivory-colored chalk officially makes the field symmetrical. I am taken in by the lovely contrast between the green, fertile grass and the rust colored infield soil. The field is immaculate.

Today my son’s team is home club.

The game begins. The first batter of the opposing team hits a line drive to left field. An impressive hit, to be sure. Several batters later and we are quickly down 3-0.

I look around and watch the boys shuffling in and out of their respective dugouts. The parents converse with each other. The mood is light but filled with excitement and anticipation. The game serves as an event for the boys to learn something about themselves and the world that surrounds them.

The sun is now setting, creating an early autumn, orange tinge in the west that only highlights the blue sky and compliments the whiteness of the isolated clouds. The scattered sunlight creates an aesthetic panoply of color that reminds me why twilight is my favorite time of day.

I watch the boys play and reflect to when I was their age. How I loved the timeless quality of the many hours that I spent on the ball field.

I am also reminded of Jack Lemmon’s moving nostalgia in Save the Tiger.

Lemmon stands outside the left field fence watching a juvenile baseball game. There’s an opening in the fence. He has a marked gleam in his eyes. He hopes that a ball rolls in his direction. When the opportunity arises, he picks up the ball and launches it with tremendous zest over the field and into the backstop behind home plate. The left fielder watches him in disbelief and utters: “Mr.,” in disappointment. Undoubtedly, age has caught up with Lemmon who is homesick for another place and time.

I marvel in witnessing how well ten year old boys can master this imaginative game of inches.

Baseball is a complex game that is made to look deceptively simple by those who play it well and with care.

We are now down 6-0. The parents look at each other and fear the worst. Alarm begins to set over a portion of the crowd. Not for the boys, though. Healthy children are resilient and spirited. Adults should take notice of this.

Things quickly improve for us, however.

Our team has a big inning, scoring four runs. The boys are animated. I notice their pride swelling. In the top of the fourth inning we are down only 6-4. Things are looking up - cookie - as my father used to say.

The evening breeze has picked up. The lights come on.

Perhaps only a handful of occasions in adult life can improve upon this experience that I am privileged to savor. I watch the boys play and wish the game would go on and on and… C.S. Lewis’ book, Touched by Joy, comes to mind. He is right. Joy is such a simple emotion to experience.

After a dropped ball here, a mishap there, and several lost opportunities, our team now finds itself down again, 7-5. The drama of baseball is a vital, unscripted lived experience. This is perhaps why so many people are attracted to this sophisticated game.

The bottom of the sixth inning has our team batting for the last time. This is do or die, as they say. There is one out. We manage to get a player safely to first base. He then advances to second. The next batter drives the ball into the outfield. With batters on first and third and one out, we sense that the tide is about to change. The players seem refreshed, newly animated.

The pitcher throws the ball over the catcher’s head. We score one run and the other runner advances to second. A hit will tie the game. Instead, the batter hits a grounder and is thrown out at first. There are two outs now, but we have a runner on third. The next pitch sails over the catcher’s head once again. Parents and player’s jump with excitement.

The game is now tied.

However, we do not manage to score again and the game ends in a draw.

Afterwards, the coaches remind the boys that not very long ago they were down 6-0. Ending the game in a tie is a good thing, they are reassured.

My son comes to me. I hug and congratulate him. He is disappointed. I tell him what a great game it was and how excited I am to watch him play again the following night.

This is the beauty of baseball, a game of inches that offers a lifetime of opportunities for renewal and redemption.

I.M. Peterson's novel, The Ever Present

2009-09-17T10:48:00.008-04:00

I.M. Peterson’s novel, The Ever Present is a curiously fresh literary work.

The story revolves around a very interesting man who is a combination of rationalist and mystic, and who has from an early age envisioned the trajectory of his life. The title refers to Jacques Lowell, who is the ever present man. Jacques is a master of perspicuity.

While other men may be good at tennis, baseball or business, Jacques is adept at seeing the essences, that, as he states: “Are the very subtle residue of God’s intelligent design.”

Jacques can see through the appearances that the daily world places in his path. Starting in his early twenties, Jacques begins to view appearances as obstacles that occlude the true meaning of human experience. He discovers that his destiny is intertwined with his will. Jacques comes to the understanding that it is precisely his control over appearances that offers him his best chance at redemption.

But what is most interesting about Jacques is the level of sophistication and wisdom by which he lives his life.

Jacques does not find it necessary or important to convey his ability and the knowledge that his wisdom provides him to others. Instead, he is content to understand that his ability to see, to read the map of human reality, as it were, always comes at a price. He often wishes that he did not have to suffer as much as he does for being the ever present man.

After spending his teen years and a large portion of his twenties trying to communicate with others, Jacques comes to the life-saving realization that he is merely explaining himself away. Of course, explanation takes time and energy, both human commodities that Jacques reasons, people need to cultivate for themselves. He sees himself as being wasted away in his appeals to others. His saving grace is his understanding that he still has many good years of his life to cultivate his soul. He knows that he must do this in the arena that includes other men. This realization is his salvation.

Jacques comes to understand his gift as being just that, a gift. It is only after he comes to understand himself as possessing a highly differentiated essence that he truly begins to appreciate his plight.

Jacques spends half of his life trying to figure out that the lives of men partake of unequaled essences that inform different people in different ways. He comes to the realization that all men are not endowed with the same ability to see. Slowly, he learns to accept this truth.

I.M. Peterson does not offer a pedantic and sophomoric portrayal of man, as some people wish man to be, or anything that resembles the hollow prototype of twenty-first century man. Instead, the author concentrates his literary prowess in giving us an insight into the life of one man, a vital being of flesh and bone that cannot be duplicated or fabricated by social engineers.
Jacques Lowell is an individual trapped in a world of soulless, interchangeable, clone-like, morally bankrupted people.

Jacques witnesses the movement of time, that is, his participation in the finite world as pertaining to the essence of eternity. What is striking about Jacques Lowell is that he has learned to see, where others do little more than glance.

After figuring out that he has very little to teach anyone, Jacques accepts his fate as that of the embodiment of wisdom. He even comes to the realization that wisdom is a staple of divinity, man’s central characteristic that removes us from Nature.

Jacques’ gift allows him the privilege of seeing that most men in the age that he lives are merely children who have never matured. He comes to pity most of the people who he interacts with, for he sees nothing in them that signals the control and discipline over the self that he enjoys.
As novels go, The Ever Present conveys the struggle of a man who has always taken the straight road to his dreams, and who has few illusions about convincing anyone about the value and importance of living a good life.

In reading The Ever Present, I began to imagine how Borges would review this fabulous book.
Ah, Borges! That insatiable reader.

First, Borges would refer the reader to the Encyclopedia Britannica. He would have us look up people like Jakob Böehme, Angelus Silesius and Paracelsus. Then he would offer some commentary pertaining to these great mystics.

Silesius got Borges thinking about the nature of aesthetics when he wrote: “Die Rose ist ohne warum; Sieblühet, weil Sie blühet” (The Rose is without ‘why’; she blooms, because she blooms).
In other words, Borges would consult the main tenets of mysticism in order to make the reader better acquainted with Jacques Lowell.

Because Jacques is essentially a first and last man all rolled up into one, Borges would also perhaps refer us to the mysterium trememdum. Concerning the mystery of human experience, Borges would say that we experience life as lived and not through the understanding that we receive from texts. This is a paradox, of course, but one which the clever Borges knew full well.

Borges might also have the reader consider the essence and destiny of Jacques Lowell and how this pertains to the “nostalgia for paradise” that Mircea Eliade so eloquently has argued for. This being the case, Borges would have no other recourse but to send the reader packing to the nearest library in search of Plato’s dialogues.

Why, this is rather easy to see. In Plato, Borges is correct to suggest, the reader of The Ever Present will encounter the Alpha and Omega of thought. Alfred North Whitehead’s suggestion that all philosophy is a footnote to Plato will not get an argument from this critic.

But let us not get ahead of ourselves.

This is a book review of a novel by I.M. Peterson’s thoughtful novel, The Ever Present. What’s the big deal? Just cover the Why? What? Where? When? and How? of the book, how these affect the main character and the tension in the novel, and get on with it. “After all, it is only a book review,” someone might object. True. This is the case indeed. Or is it? Let us not forget that Borges thinks of books as being more than what they appear to be.

In any case, this is all very interesting, for Borges would also be tempted to make us look up the idea of the numinous that Rudolf Otto has illuminated us with in The Idea of the Holy.

Borges would also undoubtedly make mention of Francis Bacon’s The New Atlantis, as a metaphor for Jacques Lowell’s discovery of a new country of the soul, one where some men are equipped to know what others do not even suspect exists.

Borges would also dazzle us by bringing to mind the Rosicrucian exercise of starring into a candle flame for hours. What exactly is it that one begins sees after a while of this exercise?

Jacques Lowell tells us only so much in the novel. The reader must earn the rest on his own.

Park Avenue

2009-09-15T11:03:00.005-04:00

Today motion has found a purpose in the rhythm of the modern city.

Make no mistake about it; motion is still cyclical, circular. Yet today motion consists of mechanical intervals. Life no longer meets time head on, but rather circumvents it.

Time and human life are naively seen by many today as being separate entities. This is an indiscretion that is perhaps occurring for the first time in history.

Unlike nomads traversing the landscape, without human attachments or memory, the city forces us to reckon with mortality in a much more visual, however distant manner. The city tames place and time like a beast of burden that we formerly conceived as wild and irascible to the human touch. The city even gives us the lamentable illusion that time has triumphed over death.

Standing at a traffic light in Manhattan, I see the Seagram Building up ahead.

It is dusk. The city vibrates with the undulating pulse of strangers going about their daily ritual.

Curiously, my mind wanders back to my walks through Pompeii. I think of the stillness of the nighttime air in that ancient, desolate and forsaken place. I begin to imagine Vesuvius spewing forth vile from its boiling liver. Do I continue walking or take flight? Who can say when danger is imminent, or when is it just a word in a language that we recognize?

As I look out at the people crossing the street, I cannot help but think about Pompeii’s forgotten splendor. I even begin to doubt my memories of eating lunch sitting outside the House of the Vettii, of contemplating the last horror-filled hours of the petrified souls that I witness on the ground before me. I imagine Pliny’s last hours. Did he have a heart attack or was he consumed by deadly fumes?

I hear the sound of horns coming from automobiles behind me, but I am not in a hurry, not here, not today. I no longer hear the sound of my engine, but I know that I am now moving.

A devastating earthquake in 62 A.D. was hardly the momentum-infusing call for Pompeian’s to become mobile, to flee. They simply looked around, took stock of their losses and rebuilt the city. On the other hand, the eruption of 79 A.D. hardly left them an option or the will to contemplate the meaning of motion, the essence of life and death.

Necessity may be said to be the mother of invention, and rightfully so, but it is often also an impetus for motion. Action/reaction, a pinched muscle that contorts our countenance into facial expressions not of our own doing, this is motion, too.

Moving through the city, I’m touched by the details that make this a marvelously place. This is what having a sense of place and time means.
My car moves forward, as I am genuinely moved by the world around me. In some respects, I am the city. At least I allow myself this indulgence. The driver behind me has long sought a faster lane.

“The Seagram Building begins to loom larger as I near it,” I tell myself. Her skin of glass reflects the last vestiges of sunlight of this day, as this twenty-four hour period is conscribed to eternity.

As for me, I am happy to relegate this sunset to the category of pleasant memories. I am now in the middle of this mysterious carnal exercise in spirit: the city. I even expect Mies van der Rohe to walk past me at any moment. I have been looking forward to coming to the corner of Park and 53rd since I was a young man.

Like a jazz score that allows for improvisation, the city is the culmination of spirit. The measurable vitality of its inhabitants, or what is equivalent to its score, is read objectivity, yet enabling the spread of differentiated wings. I find myself afloat in the energy of the city. Weightless, but spirited, I wonder if eternity is so light?

The city surrounds me. Or perhaps it is I who has pierced its inner walls?

Either way, I find myself in the presence of spirit manifested in time. I see myself sitting behind the wheel of my car reflected in a glass building, and cannot help but to be awed by my spirit made concrete. Finally, I arrive at the Seagram Building.

Now, walking on its large granite dais, I try to place myself back in 1954 and imagine the novelty of this glass giant. Fluid and transparent, like water in a glass, the Seagram Building ushered in a new way of conceiving motion.

I have always found it interesting how time levels all ideas to the commonplace. This is unfortunate, for imagination is a tool that is best fitted to reflection on the future. The past is the stuff of history, and thus quickly passes on to become the tried and left-behind.

The city, too, is a mixture of imagination and the past. In a sense, even the past has been internalized, or neglected to such an extent that it now only seems useful in delivering us to the present.

From its demotion to being the mere arbiter of the rhythm of daily life, imagination remains viable only for those who conceive it as a guide for living. People who live smack in the middle of a fast and furious moment do not need, nor do they abide by any rules of imagination. What matters most to these entities is blind motion, for motion for its own sake creates the illusion of delivering us from the past. An uncharted present brings with it all the haphazard characteristics that are anathema to a conscious will.

Looking up at the sleek lines of this glass monolith, I quickly discern the rigor of its design. Mies van der Rohe married utility with aesthetics through an act of will. Not having attended university, his vision remained uncluttered by the demons of timely fashions.

From childhood, he merely observed and remembered. A brick here, some mortar there, the assemblage of a structure is forged with spirited hands. Yet this does not preclude the fact that he was ahead of the curve of history. When the proponents of chic finally caught up with him, they merely relegated him to the dust bin of history, as not being “progressive” enough. We can only imagine irony as possessing its own reasons.

The city is the culmination of science and technology. It is also a fine reservoir of the human spirit. The city makes good use of dominant human traits and allows them to flourish, regardless of their moral value or intent.

While existence in primitive conditions could not afford indecision, indiscretion, and sloth – qualities that aim at self-destruction – these are all welcomed and solicited in the social foliage that is the city. Nowhere can man hide – even from himself – as he does in the mixed bag that is the modern city.

While glass structures reflect sun, automobiles, and other buildings, they do not necessarily reflect man’s inner dimension. This translucent being only sees itself in select situations.

Rant and rave as much as we wish, the entity that some are calling “post-modern” man venerates his own vacuous, defaced self in what has now come to pass as an empty ritual: life. Even the term, “post-modern” that man has devised to describe himself, is conveniently made to fit the self-image of this predatory name-caller.

A myriad collection of human entities, in a planet orbiting ninety-three million miles from its life-source, the city bears direct relation to humanity, each inhabitant living as in a personal cave.

The modern, the ultra-modern, neon, flash, and the invention of customized motion abet the primitive in man. This is ironic, no doubt. This may even be a paradox, but paradoxes only exist for those who recognize them as such.

For primitive man and country folk alike there are no words like “irony” and “paradox.” There is only the reality of being, the fact of being surrounded by conditions that maintain their truth-value distinct from the vagaries of language and current fashion.

In the city everything that is recognizable has a name. This gives man the illusion of godliness. This is also his downfall. The loss of transcendence and the destruction of the tools to achieve this make man’s daily life a reverberating one-note song.

Yet this truth quickly evaporates because the city is the natural order that man’s moral evolution – or de-evolution, as the case may be - demands. After all, we were able to build skyscrapers after the advent of the steel beam. Where would a mole rather live, above ground and exposed to danger or below ground in a protective cove and environment of its own creation?

The city is a great moral laboratory.

Whether it is technology driving morality or morality controlling technology, this is hardly a concern of ours any longer today. The effects either way are virtually the same. Yet it is undeniable that before there was technology man already existed, and man, in turn, cannot be separated from morality.

We have the conditions that we create, just like some men had thatch roof abodes and others worked in bronze – simultaneously. The greater question now becomes: just what becomes of technology in the hands of those who don’t have a care in its development?

Walking around this spacial glass enclosure, I cannot help but wonder how the great step pyramid of Saqqara looked to the inhabitants of Egypt in 2800 B.C. Granted, Saqqara was the great cementary of Memphis, and thus the colossal dimensions of a pyramid-tomb seem rather odd to us today.

However, the relevant comparison ought not to be between tomb and glass, and multi-function building, but rather between the geist that goes into their creation. The past, as seen from a distance future, or what is always essentially a present-now, seems quaint and even naïve. This is why everyone is virtually guaranteed the possibility of being a prophet in retrospect.

Even though the great step pyramid only holds the remains of a dead pharaoh, one cannot easily dismiss it as a mere monument. The pathos that informs architectonic creations and monuments alike is always the same. The tomb of the pharaoh, what we today refer to as pyramids, served a purpose. The purpose may seem arbitrary to “post-modern” types, but on closer inspection one discovers that purpose is tightly knitted into axiological hierarchy.

Consider Mies van der Rohe’s assertion that buildings should be functional: “I believe that in architecture you must deal with construction directly, you must, therefore, understand construction. When the structure is refined and when it becomes an expression of the essence of our time, it will then and only then become architecture. Every building has its position in a strata – every building is not a cathedral. These are facts which should be understood and taught. It takes discipline to restrain oneself,” he writes.

Key in my comparison of the tomb-pyramids of ancient man with Mies van der Rohe’s glass structure is the proposed direction of the project at hand, the purpose that it is to serve, or what amounts to the vision of those responsible for its construction.

Mies van der Rohe goes on to explain: “Refinement, grasping the essence of the time and fitting into the proper position of architectural strata.” This can assist us in better understanding the pathos that motivates the construction of the great step pyramid. Mies van der Rohe’s conditions for referring to a building as architecture are equally true in building a tomb for a dead pharaoh.

The mathematical precision that informs ancient Egyptian structures is already well established. The cutting of the stones and their fitting into position are all characteristics of Egyptian civilization that still puzzle us. This is technological precision and cultural refinement. These two components of that ancient culture only need to be compared with their opposite, sloppiness, and the inability to become moved by the sublime.

Incidentally, the construction of tomb-pyramids goes hand-in-hand with the essence of the time. In fact, this was the Egyptian’s sole reason for being. The belief in the immortality of the soul informs the cultural refinement and technical precision of the ancient Egyptians.

Immortality: The continuation of spirit in a non carnal realm. This is hardly a new concept, but one that may have reached its culmination – in the ancient world – with Egyptian culture. This singular conviction served to make that civilization a force that has lingered into our time.

And as to Mies’ “placing structures in the proper position in a strata of architecture,” the Egyptian pyramids fit just right in with this scheme. The idea that all buildings cannot be “cathedrals” is also a fine example of recognizing this hierarchy of values.

I drive off. In my rearview mirror I witness the majestic building reflecting the light of what is now an artificial day.

Reflections on Jacques Tourneur's Film Cat People

2009-09-13T09:27:00.008-04:00

Recently I had the opportunity to view Jacques Tourneur’s 1943 film Cat People. Tourneur’s cinematic work has attracted me for a long time. His films like Berlin Express, Out of the Past and Curse of the Demon are exquisite visual and lyrical gems.

Thus, the following commentary is not one of those fashionably insipid and pompous, psychoanalytic portrayals of cinema, but rather an occasion to share my delight in watching this wonderful film. I am much more interested in the honest, lived experience of sitting down to watch a film then in trying to prove that I attended graduate school.

Cat People presents an ancient legend of evil personified.

Producer Val Lewton and Tourneur created a cinematic work that is both lyrical as it is aesthetically beautiful. The light and shadows in the film express a form of subtle horror that has been absent from horror films for at least thirty years.

In short, Cat People is a film that issues from a time when entertainment - popular culture some like to call it - was neither sophomoric nor ideologically pretentious.

One can think of the interplay of light and shadow in Cat People as a kind of moving chiaroscuro. It is precisely in these vague areas where light and shadow combine that we uncover the dominant essences of human reality.

While the horror in the film is highly suggestive of the danger that surrounds the main characters, it is achieved in such a way as to make us ask: What would I do?

Tourneur convinces the audience that evil is real and that it is often much more subtle than some people are willing to concede. Curse of the Demon is another fine example of how Tourneur succeeds in exploring evil, where our anointed sociologists and psychologists fail.

Cat People is an intelligent cinematic depiction of evil. The film reminds us that the worst kind of evil is that which ultimately presents itself as less real.

While the main character, which is played by Simone Simon, eventually comes to understand the nature of her own possession, by the evil that is the panther, she remains impotent to do anything about it.

This realization pins her – and the audience – in an interesting dilemma: Either she is consumed by evil, in which case there would be no tension to her character, or she fights evil – her possession – tooth and nail.

The latter makes her come to terms with the feeble and fallen nature of man. The former possibility, on the other hand, denies man’s frail moral predicament altogether. This is why positivists make horrific artists of any staple. The triumph of positivism in our time accounts for the dearth of any significant writers and thinkers to come along in the last forty years or so.

Cat People brings to mind many works that deal with evil, including Robert Louis Stevenson's Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. By the end of the film we even come to feel empathy for the main character’s plight, which, in many regards is central to the human condition.

Travels With Thoreau

2009-09-12T10:44:00.005-04:00

When I was fourteen years old my older sister, Adriana, introduced me to Henry David Thoreau. I greatly benefited from the fact that she is four years older and that she is a reader.

I began to read Thoreau and quickly thereafter began to relish the quality of his writing and his incessant desire to be his own man. I first got acquainted with Thoreau by reading Walden, but soon after I read all his other works. His essay, “Life Without Principle” became my favorite.

However, what I valued most in Thoreau’s work was his rugged individualism.
The man saw through the trivialities of social conventions that some people cherish and decided that he did not care for them.

As a fourteen year, I found Thoreau’s individualism to be one of the things worthy of human existence. I found Thoreau’s individualism as admirable a character trait then as I do today.

Since then I have had ample time to witness and get to know firsthand an abundance of smiley face hypocrites, liars, cheats, opportunists, statist doozies and a whole slew of other people who benefit from groupthink. They have allowed me to verify Thoreau’s strongly guarded conviction that solitude is always preferable to the empty chatter of superficial acquaintances.

Thoreau’s individualism is an essential and objective principle of human life that we cannot deny. Thoreau got this right.

Of course, from reading Thoreau I was introduced to Emerson, another American thinker who I really enjoyed, for I also viewed him as being akin to my own temperament. I found much to get excited about in Emerson’s Transcendentalism. Emerson is another one of those great American thinkers who defend the virtues of individualism.

Through Thoreau I was also introduced to other conservationalists and naturalists like John Muir and Aldo Leopold. I read Leopold’s Sand County Almanac and Round River. I found the Nature writers exciting, for I discovered in them the ability to write about some of the things that were important to me at the time, and who did so with great ease.

I remember the excitement I felt when I read John McPhee’s 1977 work, Coming Into the Country. At the time I had a notion to go and live in Alaska. I even thought of applying to the University of Alaska.

I often imagined Thoreau walking around Walden Pond and being attuned to his surroundings. I was pleasantly surprised some years later when my sister brought back some stones from Walden Pond. I still have these.

On my many visits to Everglades National Park, I took the opportunity to reflect on some of Thoreau’s ideas on solitude. Even though, I went with friends, I was always moved by the silence in the woods. Having visited the Everglades many times, I became very well acquainted with many of the trails there. My friends and I went canoeing in some of the rivers there on many occasions.

On one occasion one of my friends decided to tip over the other two canoes. This was hardly a smart thing to do given that we could see the alligators in the water nearby. I also got to know the over three-hundred species of birds that make the Everglade their home.

My love of Thoreau’s books allowed me to cross-reference his work and the themes that he developed with that of other thinkers. I read Walter Harding’s works. I learned much from the re-nown Thoreau scholar. Thoreau was very much responsible for introducing me to philosophical literature.

Remember, I was fourteen years old. Discovering Thoreau was essential in my development as a young man, because literature and philosophy have come to define me professionally.

My 1970s Baltimore Orioles

2009-09-10T11:18:00.024-04:00

I played baseball with my father up to about age eighteen.

It was he who taught me how to throw and catch a baseball. It was also he who taught me how to hit a baseball, a task that is perhaps one of the most difficult in all sports.

When I began to pitch, my father was my first catcher. Years later he told me that it was not easy catching my pitches, especially when he was in his forties. He said that I threw so hard that his hand would hurt. He never told me at the time in order to allow me to show him what I had in my arsenal.

Father played baseball all of his life, so he knows the game well. He is also a traditionalist, as far as being a fan of the game is concerned. My father never missed an opportunity to teach me about the marquee players, games and past World Series that were before my time. He still talks about the excitement he felt listening to Don Larsen’s perfect game on the radio in Cuba.

My father taught me much about the great Yankee teams, Casey Stengel’s feistines and about Ty Cobb and Babe Ruth. Ted Williams was especially dear to him. He has great admiration for Teddy Ballgame. He told me about Williams’ yearly visits to Cuba, where he would play baseball and fish. Father is a great admirer of Williams’ work ethic and professionalism. Father is very proud to belong to a generation of men who, like Ted Williams, dropped their careers and family to fight in World War II and Korea.

Beginning in the spring of 1971, my father began taking me to Baltimore Orioles spring training games at Miami Stadium. The Orioles played their spring training games in Miami from 1959 to 1988. My father and I went to see the Orioles at that venue from 1971 to 1982. My memories of that time are nothing less than magical. Miami Stadium was demolished in the 1990’s.

Miami Stadium had 13,500 seats and every one of them offered a very good vantage point from where to watch a game. The stadium had only one level that allowed fans to walk down to the field level without having to go through any concourses. Also, the stadium had a curved cantilevered roof that hooked almost all the way to the dugouts.The roof just about covered all of the fans from sun and rain.

Because the games were general admission, father and I would go early and watch batting practice. I loved to stand by right and left filed and watch the pitchers warm up. I recall how accessible the players were, both, in the small confines of that stadium and during that area.

I watched the Orioles four twenty-game winners: Mike Cuellar, Dave McNally, Pat Dobson and Jim Palmer. As a pitcher, I was really impressed with Palmer’s high leg kick. Rarely do we see such grace from pitchers today. Father would take me behind home plate to watch Palmer pitch.

My father was always very excited to watch Brooks Robinson, the human vacuum cleaner, as some liked to call him, sweep balls hit to the third base area with the ease of a magician. Next to him was Mark Belanger, a shortstop who had hands of velvet. Playing second base was the sure-handed Dave Johnson.

It was during those spring training games that I watched the great A’s, Reds and Yankee teams of the 70s. I still can remember Roy White of the Yankees make a spectacular catch in left field, and rob Ken Singleton of a home run.

Some time after that I discovered that the poet and writer Ogden Nash was a very verbal fan of the Baltimore Colts and Orioles. It is interesting to read his humorous verses and see how he juxtaposes the love of sports with life itself.

I will never forget my father taking me around the different vendors so that I could pick out a memento from the many Orioles pennants, pins and helmets that were for sale. Watching those spring training Orioles games with my father are some of my most memorable memories. He explained the game to me. I listened to him more intently than I did at school.

Through the years, I have come to fully appreciate the fact that those games were more than games. Instead, they were profound experiences, when a boy is taken by the hand by his father and guided through human life in ways that planted the seed of love with every recorded out and pitch made.

Paralles

2009-09-03T14:31:00.017-04:00

Speeding cars pass each other on the highway. Bisecting the city into a mathematical grid of traffic lanes, the automobile has defined man’s desire for perpetual motion.

The modern world employs chariots, too.

The occupants of these steel time-conquerors may be oblivious to each other, but their destinies are interwoven, like the calculated angles of a spider web. A reckless move here, an indiscretion there, and the life of the unsuspecting lamb becomes sacrificed to the gods of expediency. Locomotion has now become internalized. We are no longer characterized by our zest for motion, but rather crystallized by it.

The city resembles nothing that dreamers could have conjured up a measly hundred years ago. With the precision of an experienced barber, modern man moves through his daily maze and geometric patterns, effortlessly and semi-cognizant of place and time. This is where man belongs, in the entrails of a kaleidoscope of moving parts that do not readily recognize each other. Viewing this human drama from a high rise easily confirms the latter.

Today, the beehive and the ant colony are magnified and amplified in ways that we could never have suspected.

The city ebbs and flows with incessant activity.

While we are proficient in sensing this twenty-first century spectacle, we are rarely thoughtful of its origin. The city is framed, packaged almost, by the contours of the windows of my automobile. I look out onto a world that resembles my inner constitution. How else could we master the marriage of man and civilization so seamlessly?

Driving about in a predetermined fashion, most people are barely amused by what they witness. This is not a luxury that charioteers could afford on their treks through ancient cities, and the dangers of the desolate countryside. With motion also comes danger. The greater the speed and the land traversed, the higher the possibility of bursting the core of the moving parts.

How would a speeding bronze arrow look to a complacent woolly mammoth?

The same may be said of man, only now, we are not privy to the friction and stress that underlie the essence of motion. Today we have a name for this and many other things. The act of naming makes us think that reality, too, has changed since ancient times. We are merely sightseers in a world that we imagine ourselves entitled to.

The city breathes like an unconscious fire dragon.

A delightful technological light show, the vibrant city awes those who possess a keen sensibility for detail and a spirited perspicuity. The recognition of this reality is reason enough to make heroes out of some people. For others, the city merely represents the kaleidoscopic order and rhythm of the daily grind.

Glass and steel towers glance down at pedestrians on the sidewalk, leaving man’s imagination to fend for itself. Touching the clouds, our architectural creations beckon for our attention.

I drive slowly, looking about me like a newborn looks at his hands, for the first time. Irony has never been so downtrodden. Driving through glittering boulevards, my sight becomes fixed on the towering, sky-hugging monuments of “skin and bones” that make visible man’s spirit.

Somehow our creations in glass and steel transcend us. These towers are monuments to the strife and joy of the human condition. Unfortunately, we more often than not misappropriate the value of those things nearest to us.

Somewhere behind these inconspicuous gods of verticality, the blazing Sun sets on another day, on what just a century ago was considered the distant future.

What a strange notion, this idea of the future. What a sensation, to know that tomorrow and tomorrow and…might never arrive. This projection of ourselves into a time that has yet to come is a purely human trait. While living in the immediate present, or what is the only time that we actually possess, we also place great stock in a time that has not yet arrived. This fascination with the future is original to the essence of that soul who we refer to as homo sapiens. The future frames our present.

Today we are acting the part of man in the future.

Homer, Dante, and Galileo would gasp at the sight of the world that we have fashioned from sweat and will. The future looms before us as never before in history. There is no denying the fact that the idea of the future has always served as one of man’s noblest. Thoughts on the future have inspired us to meet it head on.

The future: the projection of the present into eternity, as far as man is concerned. And, “as far as man is concerned,” well, what else can we be privy to? Whatever God’s perspective might be, we cannot tell, for as part to whole, finite to infinite, we are merely capable of scratching the surface. We must learn to wear our skin well.

A Pompeii of Glass; Herculaneum of steel, the city of God made of flesh and blood, but molded by spirit, the city is our destiny. The Iron Age has come of age in all its implications. This is the future, if there ever was such a thing. The major difference between our shimmering metropolis’ and Pompeii is not our glass towers or the latter's fate of being buried in ash and petrified for the ages, but rather the stillness of the night air.

In our world, the wind whispers of things to come, of the effervescent quality of the future. The stagnation brought on by the passing years has made the ancient world into a museum for the enjoyment of our glancing curiosity.

Driving through a modern city, we are made to believe that the world is but a series of points measured in the distance between street lights. Having tamed darkness and the restless voices that rumble through this mysterious modality of human reality, we now make demands on God. The absence of darkness has made our sense of security rather delusional.

While in antiquity some cities were dedicated to the Gods and the good favor that such respect and veneration brought to its inhabitants, today the city acts as the main vehicle in the obliteration of God. The effect that never looking up at the night sky has on our sensibility cannot easily be dismissed. Babylon is a fine case in point. Its destruction meant famine and death; a curse to its desecraters and destroyers.

Consider a city dedicated to the memory of the dead. What would the night air there be like? A city to the dead signifies a commemoration of that which once seemed merely transient in nature.

One hundred thousand years ago man began to bury the dead.

This is a novel idea. Practical, even. The inquietude of nomadic restlessness gave way to a stationary confrontation with human reality. If to remain still and establish roots meant the creation of cities, then, clearly the respectful disposal of the dead has served as a civilizing force.

Motion tamed is sentiment gained.

If the dead are no longer to be left to the mercy of matter and the ravages of wild beasts, and to ruthless time, this suggests that a greater attachment to the dead has taken place. Now, for the first time, the dead share the very spaces that the living inhabit. “They are there…and there…all around me,” wonders a youngster on his walk to fetch some water. What this means is that the city is now practical in aim, eternal in its ability to root us to place and time…and to each other.

Dawn

2009-08-31T17:25:00.000-04:00

First there is morning - primeval morning - the one of eternal consequence. The only discernible movement in this initial parting from form belongs to the dew, stretching down from the leaves. But the absence of sunlight makes this primary manifestation of being illusive.

When does the separation of being from essence first take place? And when does the solidity of being become splintered with a vagrant multiplicity?

That first morning determined the tonic of time. In its first phase, the dethronement of understanding by reason castrated Cronos into oblivion. But this cosmic falling out was clouded in midst, giving subsequent observers the misguided impression of an early permanence.

This was the last vestige of imagination.

When the mist of this primordial morning cleared, the world already felt old and weary. To counter this early fatigue imagination needed to exercise a vital will.

To this day imagination demands of its practitioners a vital root in a conscious will. If most fail in this task - the answer, however - is comically clear: The senses and the over-luminous brightness of midday have forever ensconced man in this failed material condition.

The Second Morning

The second day breaks with a heavy blanket of dew that covers the harshness of the land. In the distance…a figure walks gallantly toward the horizon. He holds the Sun high above his head. Flinging the giant sphere into the void of space, he settles down to admire his work – his tenacity. A smile now drips from his mouth, as he sits on the wet ground to praise his vision.

From the opposite horizon another figure quietly emerges from the young chaos of this emanation. Zeus grabs Prometheus by the back of his neck, as the younger man struggles to free himself. He scolds him: “Indiscretion is born out of ill-reasoned thoughts – and quite often from a mere negation.”

As a ghastly eagle feasts on Prometheus’ liver high on Mount Caucasus, his patience now intensifies, grows. Anticipation now becomes ossified. Awaiting the next night that brings renewal, he begins to view himself as irreverent – proud. The following day the eagle returns – Prometheus waits in guarded expectation – he flinches with the initial stab of pain until this, too, becomes part of the order of things.

“What else to do?” he figures, but to continue to take his cue from his good friend, Sisyphus.

Borges: Philosopher of Time and the Imagination

2009-08-28T10:53:00.004-04:00

Jorge Luis Borges (1899-1986) is known as a writer of fantastic tales. His stories are speculative and replete with paradoxes.

The Argentine writer developed a narrative technique that, in one way or other, has influenced many other post World War Two writers. His stories like, “El Aleph” (The Aleph), “Martin Fierro” and “Las Ruinas Circulares” (The Circular Ruins) are some of his most widely read.

Today Borges is studied in English-speaking universities and schools like perhaps no other Latin American writer. His work enjoys a truly international following. Borges’ fame as a writer is rather interesting given that this is solely based on his short stories and essays. Borges did not write novels.

With his fascination for Chesterton, Borges intrigues his readers with his metaphysically provocative stories and essays. Borges’ short stories are never what they seem at first glance. His stories do not follow a linear narrative style. Borges always gives the impression of being more interested in the complex themes of his work than in writing works that merely entertain.

Yet his playfulness as a storyteller is welcomed, for it is in the essences that inform appearance and reality that we make sense of human reality.

Borges’ stories are like small water falls that only intensify as they seek the river below. The gravitas of his stories always give us pause to reflect. Many of his stories make the reader doubt whether their author is jokingly sparring with them.

Borges creates imaginary worlds to which he attributes seemingly non-fictional references. His love of encyclopedias allows him to infuse his work with a true-to-life flair that makes us want to check his sources. A lot of people who read Borges sparingly find this tongue and cheek literary device rather frustrating. Some readers even find him pedantic.

For example, his story “Undr” deals with the existence of a fictitious nation called “Urns.” The great contribution of those who lived in that land is that they gave us the word “undr.” This word, Borges has his narrator explain, is translated as “Gonder.” Gonder, we are told, is “wonder.” The narrator goes on to say that this gonder that the inhabitants of Undr practiced touched upon all aspects of the human condition. These people were ruled by the belief that wonder is the most essential aspect of human life. Remember, this is an example of Borges' imagination at work.

Yet I would argue that the most interesting aspect of Borges, the man, is the relationship that exists in his work between fiction and philosophy. Even though Borges is not a philosopher, that is, in the academic sense, he is definitely a philosophical writer. For instance, in “Borges y Yo” (Borges and I), the writer tells us that he does not recognize himself in his work because the public Borges, that is, the writer, is the one who receives the attention of other people. “Borges y Yo” is a fine example of his preoccupation with ideas and how they take their cue from human reality.

When we read Borges we always also encounter Plato, Schopenhauer, Chesterton, Bergson and Husserl, to cite only a few of the thinkers who influenced his literary work. This offers his work a unique quality and perspective. While very few philosophers write fiction, many good writers have mastered philosophy rather well. Of course, what makes Borges a philosophical writer like: Dostoevsky, Witkiewicz, Milosz, Cortazar and C.S. Lewis, to name a few, has to do with how philosophical themes inform his collected work.

Borges is consistent in his exploration of the relationship that exists between subjectivity and objective reality. This is viewed by some critics as too much to consider. It is true that a lot of readers do not want to bear this cross. This phenomenological/existential angle of his work is the very same one that Ortega y Gasset treats in “Goethe From Within.”

However, in defense of Borges, we must recognize that his philosophical tampering allows this imaginative writer an immense freedom to explore philosophical themes from his literary forum. This makes for some very interesting twists on themes that many philosophers – certainly those of the academic/analytic variety – have exhausted and muddled up unnecessarily.

Borges jostles ideas in a way that is refreshing.

Of course, Borges does not have to defend the ideas that he puts forth. This is a luxury that literature can afford. Literature allows the Borges of “Borges y Yo” to endure to infinity.

Children, Dogs, Books and the Pursuit of Happiness

2009-08-26T17:17:00.000-04:00

For close to a year now my two children have been looking forward to getting a family dog. During that time several opportunities came along, but the dogs that friends and acquaintances offered were never quite right for us. We wanted to get a puppy that the children would get to know from the outset. As to the type of dog, whether pure bred or mixed, that was never a concern for us.

While I have had dogs all of my life, this was to be our first dog since the birth of our children. I have owned two German Shepherds, a Poodle and many mixed dogs in my life. I have learned much from my dogs: Mota, Megaton, Rudy, Dinky, Puccini, Coco and Bengie.

Dogs are truly loyal companions. They can be highly intelligent, warm and protective of family members and property. Dogs also remind us of the importance of humility. As pets go, I can't imagine other animals that can surpass dogs.

Recently we went out to a local agency that rescues animals and found a puppy that is about seven weeks old. He is a gorgeous little animal. We named him Lincoln. He is a Labrador and German Shepherd mix. Of course, the children are delighted.

I've always believed that children should have a pet. Pets can foster a sense of hands-on responsibility that only work can provide. Country children not only own animals, but they deal with the rituals of life and death in much more concrete ways than city children ever can. Hunters teach their children the values of self-reliance and respect for animals.

Because I have had many opportunities to care for dogs and to watch them grow and pass away, I have experienced the joy that dogs have brought to my life.

I watched Lincoln roaming around the house, claiming shoes and other household objects to call his own. I remembered how wonderful it was in the past whenever my parents brought a new dog home. I watched Lincoln and I couldn't help but think how time will eventually pass and how he too will become old, just like all the others. However, after several minutes, I began to concentrate on the very funny things that I have seen dogs do. Some of these, like the destruction of shoes, record albums and furniture only seem funny from a distance.

The other day when I was alone in the house with Lincoln, I began to reflect on some memorable dogs in literature. Aesop's Fables, for example, introduces the reader to some very crafty dogs that remind us of humans. This got me thinking about humorous dogs in literature.

The Brazilian writer, Machado de Assis, quickly came to mind. His novel, Philosopher or Dog? is a tragicomic tale of madness and vanity. When a mad philosopher named Quincas Borba dies he leaves a great fortune and a dog to the main character, Rubiao, who is a poor schoolmaster. The interesting aspect of the novel is that while the philosopher is remembered for having written an incomprehensible work on the nature of man, the illiterate only remember him for his dog.

I also thought about Schopenhauer and his dog Atma. Atma means "world soul." Schopenhauer's books, The Wisdom of Life and Counsels & Maxims are reservoirs of some of mankind's greatest wisdom. The idea that Schopenhauer should keep a dog as his most trusted companion is rather significant, I believe. I suppose one can attribute to him the timeless wisdom: "The more that I come to know man, the more I love my dog." Much like Epictetus, Schopenhauer was not one to be taken by appearances.

Dogs demonstrate great consistency of emotion. Their modesty and sincerity also remind me of the value of Montaigne's immortal Essays. In "Of Vanity" he writes: "As if good fortune were incompatible with good conscience, men never become good except in bad fortune. Good fortune to me is a singular spur to moderation and modesty."

I have yet to encounter a better display of the character of man's best friend than that of Orfeo, the dog in Unamuno's novel, Mist. At the conclusion of that profoundly comic, existential work, Orfeo offers a moving funeral oration by way of an ingenious epilogue. Mourning the death of his master, Augusto, Orfeo offers the reader a nuanced perspective on the follies and contradictions that mankind often embrace. Orfeo is quick to point out that unlike bulls or horses, dogs have never been joined to man by force, but rather through a free choice, a social contract.

After another character in the novel discovers Orfeo dead by his dead master's feet, he exclaims: "And yet they say that grief never kills!"

The Joy of Literature

2009-08-21T15:43:00.000-04:00

Reading is a form of human adventure that removes us from our daily toil. Regardless of the objections of some misguided, malcontented souls who insist in ascribing an extrinsic, coerced purpose – often a social/political role to literature – the heart and soul of literature continues to be entertainment.

Man is a storyteller.

Ironically, because we are capable of telling stories, we often find ourselves doing so in ways that remove us from our all-too-human predicament. A sincere, free-spirited search for knowledge always culminates in the understanding that truth is a fundamental, guiding tool in human existence, but that it is only one of many tools that we employ in order to live contented lives.

After all, objective truths that pertain to human life and death, our spacial-temporal, mortal limitations, and our capacity to embrace or refuse these, are all wrapped into one complex reality that we experience as our vital, existential existence. Make no mistake about the latter, human existence is always personal, differentiated and not something that we can transfer to another. This is why literature affects us all differently.

Consider Wordsworth’s wisdom in his majestic poem “The World is Too Much with Us,” where the poet beckons the reader to divest our vital, mortal energy from the world:

The world is too much with us; late and soon,
Getting and spending, we lay
waste our powers:
Little we see in Nature that is ours;
We have given
our hearts away, a sordid boon!

Absent from these lines is the pathological call to utility that is such a staple of our time. Stated in simple terms, the poem is a reflection on leisure, on the glory and curse of the passage of time, and our handling of the latter.

The purpose of literature is to entertain and guide our mind and soul. This task includes the ridiculous and the sublime. The apparent gap that informs these two poles is the essence of human existence. Is this not what we learn from Aesop’s Fables?

Yes, we ought not to be afraid to make ourselves ridiculous from time to time. In doing so we laugh in the face of all those forces that we cannot comprehend...or control.

My Time in Purgatory

2009-08-19T11:45:00.001-04:00

As a topic of reflection for this, the initial essay of my blog, I thought it appropriate to write about the importance of conscience, discretion and good will in daily life.

Unfortunately, our time is one that is marked by charlatanism. Charlatans abound today in all aspects of society and in all of our most cherished institutions. Charlatans are by their very nature recklessly enamored with the lowly demands that mediocrity makes on those who cling to her.

Today we encounter the vacuous, gloating arrogance of charlatans in the vile voices of radical ideologues, in those who use the pulpit to try to legitimize a morally indefensible ideology, in the halls of academia, in the Oval Office and its environs, in popular music, the mass media, the arts and what was formerly regarded as the humanities. Not to be undone, most self-described intellectuals gleam with an undeniable, yet striking degree of self-importance that borders on the tragic - for themselves and all those who are tainted by their poisoned words.

This brings to mind Celine's sincerity when he writes in Castle to Castle: "Let's talk about work, the job of writing. It's the only thing that counts. And even that calls for a good deal of discretion. Too much publicity in the way people talk about these things. We're objects of publicity. It's revolting. It's high time people took a cure of modesty. In literature as in everything else we're befouled by publicity. It's disgraceful. I say: do your job and shut up, that's the only way. People will read read it or they won't read it, that's their business. The only thing for the author to do is to make himself scarce."

I suppose modesty is not one of those temptations that most intellectuals easily spiral into. A quick glance at the reasons for which writers, intellectuals and celebrities receive awards today makes us realize that there is an award-giving industry that is driven by the all-consuming temptation of appealing to appearances, not reality. There are more awards handed out today to writers, academics and intellectuals than there is genuine talent in these fields. The reality is that most awards today are designed to cast light on the agency or institution handing out the award and not on the recipient.

Interesting, isn't it?

I.M. Peterson's novel, Time in Purgatory, is an interesting display of what happens when modesty and sincerity are exchanged for self-promotion and conceit. Landestoy McCourt, the main character, is summoned by the devil to recruit new souls to his cause. McCourt carefully calculates the rewards that he will reap from such a pact. McCourt welcomes the challenge, finding it a boost to his already swollen ego. After a short time McCourt surprises the devil with his efficiency. The new recruits begin to fall on the devil's lap in astounding numbers. Being highly impressed by McCourt's cunning and amicable guile, the devil becomes jealous and demands that McCourt reveal his secret. Of course, McCourt uses the devil's envy as a bargaining chip. In short, McCourt outshines the devil.